


so the seasons will change us (but you’re the best I’ve known)

by Bugsquads



Series: wasteland, baby [1]
Category: Ant-Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Zombie Apocalypse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-06
Updated: 2019-06-01
Packaged: 2020-02-27 10:04:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 39,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18736846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bugsquads/pseuds/Bugsquads
Summary: ‘Hope’s all hard edges and determined silences, and seeing her like this, late at night, feels wrong, like she doesn’t quite fit with the picture of soft t shirts and softer hair. But he guesses that was her life once, not so long ago. This is where they should all belong, not out there with bruised skin and adrenaline fuelling them. His fifteen-year-old shouldn’t know how to shoot a gun or throw knives with perfect accuracy. But this is where they are.’At the end of the world, Hope’s busy trying to forget her past and make it to the scientist who could change everything. Scott’s busy learning how to raise Cassie in the apocalypse. They need each other more than they realise.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So uhh my goblin brain came up with this. Please enjoy, as always apologies for any errors, I write on a garbage iPhone.

The world does not end in fire. There are no demons breaking through the earth’s crust, no proclamations of doomsday from tin-hatters in the street. It ends on a Monday, as if the whole universe is laughing at people dreading the work week ahead, as if to say  _ you think this is bad? Watch what I can do next. _

It’s a typical day in San Francisco, and Hope Van Dyne drinks too much coffee and drives to work with the windows rolled down, fingers drumming out the bass of the song on the radio on the steering wheel. It’s a hot day, sunshine pouring into her car and later, into the windows of her top floor office at Pym Tech. In the streets below, businessmen hurry to meetings, college students sit out on the green and pretend to study, people visit stores and attend yoga classes. Birthdays are celebrated, deaths are mourned, promotions are earned. It’s life, in all its big and little moments, and it’s taken for granted. Nobody pays attention to the blacked out windows of the warehouse in a bad part of town, where twelve human-sized cages are being filled as a part of an experiment which eight scientists have waited a lifetime to complete. 

Hope eats lunch at her desk, eyes focused on the sixty-page report on her computer, turning her eyes fuzzy with concentration. The twelve people are dragged, screaming, from their cages one by one, injected with something bright pink. There’s a little girl of seven who cried when the needle makes contact with skin, an old man of eighty who stares the scientists down until his eyes glaze and the serum takes hold. After two hours, the scientists are satisfied. They leave the building, leave the doors wide open behind them. The rest is up to fate. 

Hope spends the afternoon in the lab, doing the practical work she loves best, leaves around six-thirty and heads to her parents’ house. They make chicken pot pie and then all three of them work on some work problem of Hope’s, a puzzle piece she can’t quite work out. 

Hope drives home to her apartment, noticing nothing out of the ordinary except for maybe a few more sirens than usual. Hope chalks it up to some car accident on the freeway, pushes it from her mind. She falls asleep around midnight, dreams about being six years old and lost in the city, wakes up in a panic at five a.m and checks her phone. She doesn’t know that she’s just lived the last ordinary day of her life. 

  
  


“Dad,” Cassie Lang holds the wire up in front of her face, fiddling with the knot. “Is this right?” It’s a snare, ready to be set near their makeshift home in the woods, where they’ve been for the five months, trying to live through the winter. Before that, they spent months just walking, just trying to survive. Nobody expected a damned zombie apocalypse, it’s not like it could really be planned for. 

“That looks great, Peanut!” Scott smiles, mussing up Cassie’s hair like she’s ten again, not a fifteen-year-old who’s almost as tall as he is.

Cassie looks at him like she’s just been told she made the varsity soccer team or something, and Scott feels a little sick. He has no idea if he’s doing this right, but there’s no guide on how to raise a kid at the end of the world. Half of him wants to shelter Cassie from every type of harm or sadness she could encounter, wants to keep her inside the cabin in the middle of the woods, miles from civilisation, for the rest of his days. The other half of him knows that it’s important she knows how to survive. The first half of him is the reason the cabin is their base, the reason he keeps them here rather than looking for one of the safe zones he had heard chatter about before they cut themselves off from the outside world. The reason they don’t go in search of any kind of  _ normal  _ life, or use the old radio Scott had once used to try and track down other survivors. It’s too dangerous to do that anymore. 

The second half of him is the reason he plucked a gun from Paxton’s barely cold body after they left the city, the reason he stocks up on ammo whenever he can, the reason he taught Cassie how to load the gun, unjam the barrel, affix a silencer and shoot at a moving target without breaking a sweat. (After learning how to do all of this first himself, of course.) The second half of him is the reason he teaches her how to make snares in the woods and cook rabbit and open cans with a knife and dress a wound and, most importantly of all, never ever trust anybody. Not a single soul. Scott teaches Cassie to run in the opposite direction if she even suspects there’s another person around. 

Scott tries to maintain some sense of normalcy too, as impossible as it seems. He rigs up solar panelled lights and a system to collect rainwater, pockets nail polish every time he loots a store that sells any and helps Cassie paint her fingernails all colours of the rainbow. There’s a library in the nearest town which Scott collects books from, bringing them back to the cabin in stacks. Together, they read about Paddington Bear and nuclear physics and everything in between. They doodle with a pack of broken crayons and stick the terrible art on the walls, and Scott teaches himself to do eight different kinds of hair braid in Cassie’s hair (see, he tells Cassie, the apocalypse has its uses. He didn’t even know there  _ were  _ eight types of braid before this.)

Every day is entrenched with fear, both of them trained by this point to react to so much as a twig snap in the vicinity. They string up tin cans around the nearby trees so they’ll hear if anyone, or any _ thing _ is coming. Neither can remember the last time they had a proper night’s sleep. But still, it’s a carved out life. It works. Until the water system gets jammed, and there’s more zombies than Cassie alone knows how to deal with. Until Scott falls off the roof. 

  
  


There’s a kid in the back of the pharmacy Hope’s planning to raid. At first she thinks it’s a zombie, snarling around some human remains or stuck on it's rotting limbs. Then she thinks it’s an adult woman, spending a split second to check whether or not it’s Gamora, as she has every time she comes across a woman in the past few months since the midnight argument which Hope regrets more and more with each passing second. Then the person tilts their head up, catching the light, and Hope can see she's a  _ kid _ , no older than sixteen - maximum. 

Hope stands in the doorway, door hanging off its hinges and pushed aside, hitching her backpack up higher on her shoulders. This is a dilemma. Hope works alone, had done since Gamora left, can’t risk matching up with someone who might be a liability. The only thing that matters anymore is staying alive. She doesn’t  _ want  _ to enter the pharmacy. The girl might try something stupid or be part of an ambush or, worst of all, beg Hope for  _ help.  _ And then she’ll have to say no, and walk away, and try not to break her own damn heart. 

But this is the last pharmacy on the edge of this crap town before the area turns from brick buildings and cracked roads to woods and mountains and silence. Hope’s planning to disappear, stick to forest for as long as she can. But she’s out of bandages and antibacterial gel, and her lungs feel heavier every day, probably an infection. She needs supplies, or she’s scared she won’t make it out of the other side of the trees. 

Her decision, as it turns out, is made for her. There’s a groaning sound on the road a little ways back, and Hope snaps her head to the left, watching a lone zombie ambling in her direction. It hasn’t seen her yet, but within another couple of feet it will pick up her scent, drawn to the one living thing amongst miles and miles of death. Hope could deal with this right now, shot to the head, but she doesn’t want to risk attracting any more of the undead. So instead, she steps inside the pharmacy, heaving the door closed behind her as quietly as she can. 

There’s a gasp. The girl has heard her. Hope twists around, presses her fingers to her own lips, eyes sliding to the window as the breathy groans of the undead creature grow louder. 

The girl looks half starved, dark hair falling into her face, a bandage wound tightly around her arm, spots of fresh blood flecking the white. Hope worries that it’s a bite. If it is, it would be kinder to shoot the kid right now. And Hope really,  _ really  _ doesn’t want to do that. But she will, if it comes to it. 

“Don’t hurt me,” the girl hisses, eyes wide, hands shaking around white bottles of pills. The creature outside ambles past. 

“Don’t bother me, and we won’t have a problem. Ok?” Hope tries to keep her voice even and commanding. She’s got the upper hand here, and she knows it. She’s got martial arts training, the array of weapons about her person which she mentally runs through and checks on twenty times a day. 

“I…ok. Ok,” the girl nods, eyes still affixed on Hope. 

Hope frowns at her, pushing her too-long hair behind her shoulders. “What are you looking for, anyway?” She doesn’t know why she asks. She doesn’t  _ need  _ to ask. She needs to get her stuff and get out of there, find shelter in the woods by nightfall. 

The girl bites her lip, hesitates. “Antibiotics. For my dad. Some pain meds. Something antiseptic. I-I don’t know. I just need him to get better,” her voice cracks at the end of the sentence, eyes swimming with tears, and god, the kid is so  _ soft.  _ She’s never going to survive this world. 

“What happened?” Hope hates herself for following up. 

“He fell. He was fixing our water system, it was clogged up with-with leaves or something, I don’t know. And then there were zombies on us, and I nearly got bit, and dad tried to save me, but he fell and scraped his leg real bad, and it got infected and now...he won’t...he won’t wake up,” there are tears leaking from the girl’s eyes now, tracking marks in the dirt on her face. 

“You said you almost got bit,” Hope starts, eyes fixed on the bandage on the girl’s arm. If a zombie has so much as grazed her, Hope’s going to take what she needs and run. 

“They didn’t touch me. I did this to myself. Killing them... with a knife,” the girl says in a shaky voice, like she can’t believe it’s a sentence she’s actually saying. 

“Ok. Ok,” Hope nods slowly, and then begins searching the small room for the items she needs. There’s not much left, mostly having been looted already, likely at the very start of the chaos. She thinks that most of the people who stole from here are probably dead by now. 

“I don’t...I don’t know what to do,” the girl is frozen in place. 

“And you think I do?”

“ _ Please.  _ Please,” she’s half sobbing now, hands shaking so much that the pills are rattling around in the bottles she’s holding. 

Hope’s going to say no. That’s her rule. Say no, stay alive. For all she knows, this is a trap, and she’s going to be dragged off somewhere to be murdered.

But something about the kid reminds her...well, of herself. The world is an awful, awful place right now. If Hope can save this kid’s dad, extend the time this family has together, even if it’s only by a few weeks, then maybe she should do it. 

“What’s your name?” Hope asks, pocketing a roll of bandages. 

“Cassie.”

“Cassie,” Hope tries the name out for size. “I’m Hope. And if this is a trap, I’m probably going to shoot you.”

  
  


Scott wakes up to half darkness, ears ringing, head pounding so much that he’s sure he’s been hit with a crowbar or a falling tree or a bus. It takes him a while to open his eyes fully, to adjust to his surroundings, feel cold air on his face. When they’re open properly, he remembers. He remembers scraping his leg on the rusty metal of the roof, the terror in his heart at seeing Cassie surrounded by monsters. The horror at watching her kill them. Holding her, arms covered in blood, as she sobbed afterwards. Scott remembers the fever taking hold, his whole body feeling too heavy to move, aching, shivering, boiling. Blackness. 

“Cassie?” Blind panic overtakes Scott as he tries to sit up, struggling against the spots of light popping in his eyes. 

“Woah, woah, woah,” there are hands on his shoulders, pushing him back. Strong and steady, and there’s a curtain of dark hair, a face that is not Cassie’s swimming into view. 

“ _ Where’s Cassie _ ?” Scott demands, fighting against the hands with everything he’s got. Unfortunately, that isn’t much, and his head meets the pillow again in no time, hands reaching up to rub the exhaustion from his eyes. 

“She’s sleeping,” the face hisses, and Scott’s vision is growing clearer by the second. His eyes study the woman’s face, the bruise on her cheekbone, the whites of her eyes, the mud on the sleeve of her too-big t-shirt. 

“What?” That's not the answer he had been expecting. And he’s not sure he believes it, has no reason to. “Where? Where is she?”

The woman rolls her eyes, pulling Scott up by the shoulder until he’s squinting round at the rest of the room. Still in the cabin. Good, that’s a start. His eyes find Cassie in the corner of the room, curled up on the armchair there. Scott freezes for a second, silence filling his ears until he can hear Cassie’s soft snores. The kind that have remained the same since she was a toddler. 

“She’s fine,” the woman lets go of Scott’s shoulder and he falls back down, head still pounding. 

“Who are you? Why are you here?” 

“I saved your  _ life _ . You could be a little more grateful?”

“You what now?”

“The infection. It was really bad, and Cassie was afraid you weren’t going to make it. She was right,” the woman shrugs. “But now you’re fine.” She stops, turning away from him to cough, deep and hacking and agonising sounding. 

“Hey, hey. Are  _ you  _ ok?” Scott shuffles up the pillows until he’s half sitting, unsure why he’s concerned for this stranger. Except for the fact that she saved his life. And she spared Cassie’s. 

“That’s none of your concern,” the woman says after a few more seconds of coughing, but she sits down on the edge of Scott’s bed all the same, by his feet. He watches her, noticing the way she’s trying to catch her breath whilst making it seem like she’s fine. There are rips in her jeans, arms dotted with small cuts, opening the skin over the muscles he can see beneath. She looks like she’s been through hell. She’s also sort of beautiful. 

“How did you find us?” Scott asks next. 

“Cassie. She was in some pharmacy looking for medication. Probably would have accidentally poisoned you if I hadn’t showed up.”

“She went into  _ town _ ?” Scott’s horrified. Anything could have happened. She could have been taken by zombies or gangs or shot at or lost in the woods. She’s  _ all  _ he has left in the world. 

“She had to. You were going to die,” Hope reiterates. “She asked me for help, and I was going this way anyway, so,” she shrugs. “Here I am. You’re welcome.”

“I… thank you,” Scott settles for, brain still wrestling with exhaustion and confusion and the dregs of the fever. “Thank you,” he finds her eyes again, looks into them so she knows he means it. 

“Like I said, I was going this way anyway.”

“Would you just let me thank you? What’s your name, anyway?”

There’s hesitation in her expression, Scott can tell. 

“Hope,” she says quietly, studying the dirt under her fingernails. 

“Hope?” He coughs. “That’s ironic.”

“Hmm. Is it?” She stares him down until he has to look away. 

“I...It’s good to meet you, Hope. I’m Scott. Lang.”

“I know. Cassie told me.”

“Oh. Did she tell you my social security too. Is this all an elaborate scheme for you to rob me?” Scott elicits the ghost of a smile from Hope at that. It’s gone a second later when she starts to cough again. But Scott thinks that her smile’s beautiful, and there’s not much beauty in the world anymore. He makes it his mission to see it again. 

 

Hope wants to leave after another few hours, as Scott continues to improve, but he can tell that her cough is worsening, her skin feels a little too warm whenever it makes brief contact with his. He’s known her for less than a day, but the way he sees it, life is incredibly precious now. It always has been, he knows, but he never really registered it before, the value of a human life. Especially the value of a  _ good _ human life, of a person who would do something for you and expect very little in return. He wouldn’t feel right if Hope walked back out into the world like this, feels some sort of strange attachment to her. He’s pretty sure it’s because she saved his, and his daughter’s life. Figures he owes her now, that he’s doing them both a favour by suggesting that she stays for a few more days. It takes some convincing, but she eventually agrees to it, settling back into the couch with a fork and a can of peaches. 

 

One day of Scott knowing Hope turns into one week. He regains his strength on a diet of rabbit, which Cassie proudly catches and prepares herself, tomatoes grown in the small yard of the cabin, and cans of fruit from the stockpile in the pantry. Scott’s been careful with food since they got here, he and Cassie never eating more than they’ve needed to, planting seeds as soon as the sky warmed up enough to soften the earth. He’s glad of it now, able to eat two helpings per day and offer the same to Cassie and Hope. 

Scott fixes the water system, climbing back into the roof of the cabin, feeling a little more relaxed about doing it now that Hope’s on the ground, able to help out if there are monsters lumbering towards them out of the trees again. But there aren’t, this time. There’s just the wind in the trees, the sound of an axe hitting wood as Hope chops logs for the fire, Cassie on the perimeter of the property, checking the snares. It’s not that Scott trusts Hope completely, but there’s a certain sense of ease he feels when he’s around her. He knows, logically, that’s how he would feel with anyone who had been given the option of using Cassie for their own gain, or killing her on sight, but instead helped her find the right medication, helped her get home, and helped her save her father’s life. And he also knows, logically, that Hope being here makes him feel lighter because she’s an extra pair of eyes and ears, extra pair of hands to wield a weapon. There’s safety in numbers to some extent, Scott has to admit. What he doesn’t know, can’t find a logical explanation for, is why he can’t imagine having spent this week with anyone else. Doesn’t think he would have invited anyone else to stay if they’d wanted to leave, cough or no cough, lifesaver or no. 

They keep their distance over the week, emotional rather than physical, because it’s difficult to do that in a tiny cabin. Scott offers Hope the one bedroom which Cassie has been using before whilst he slept on the couch, but she declines, citing his need to get his strength back up. Instead, Cassie takes the couch, Hope takes the thick rug on the ground behind it. Scott feels terrible about it, but it’s an argument he’s accepted he isn’t going to win, at least not while he’s still recovering, still a little shaky on his feet. 

They settle into some kind of routine. Hope wakes up the earliest, leaves to check the perimeters and nearby trails whilst Scott and Cassie cobble together a breakfast. It’s late spring, by Scott’s best guess, the sun getting warmer with each passing day. They’ve survived the winter, by some sort of miracle, thawed out like the ground underfoot, and spring somehow still manages to feel like a new beginning even when the planet has given up on those. 

Hope teaches Cassie to throw knives in the woods, etching targets into trees and nodding stoically when Cassie hits them. They forage for berries and mushrooms in the woods, Scott checking them religiously against the drawings in their plant books, terrified of having survived the onslaught of the apocalypse only to be brought down by some kind of poisonous plant. 

Hope leaves for long swathes of the afternoons, never telling either of them where she’s going or when she’ll be back, but she leaves some of her stuff every time, and they have no choice but to believe she  _ will  _ come back. She’s growing restless, Scott can tell. Despite the fact that she looks paler than ever and has to stop to take a breath every time they walk for too long, or that he catches her coughing so hard she has tears in her eyes when she’s done. 

“Where are you headed that’s so important, anyway?” Scott asks, on day seven, book ends on the couch, Cassie curled up with an old magazine between them. It’s a National Geographic with a feature about global warming, and Scott can’t help but wonder whether the earth, as a whole, isn’t better off now. 

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” Hope responds, and her eyelids are drooping a little as they sit in the dull of the string lights. The heavy curtains are all closed, windows and doors locked and double checked. But night time still fills Scott with a deep uneasiness. 

“We’ve seen some weird shit, Hope,” Cassie points out, turning the page of the magazine. 

That ghost of a smile is back on Hope’s lips, and Scott’s stomach does a stupid swoopy thing he doesn’t have an explanation for. It doesn’t make sense, because it’s not like he  _ likes  _ Hope. She’ll be gone as soon as she’s confident Scott is well enough to be left alone, anyway, as much as he’ll tell her she doesn’t have to go. 

“It doesn’t concern you two, anyway. It’s not something you need to worry about,” Hope tells them. And Scott’s sure she’s got a thousand reasons not to tell them. Maybe she’s worried they’ll want to come too, or that they’ll try and take whatever she’s headed towards before she gets there. He doesn’t know. What he does know is that he’s pretty sure he’s going to feel a little more empty when she walks out of their door for the last time. 

 

“Hope,” Scott stops her, later, when she comes out of the bathroom, changed out of her grimy clothes into the oversized t shirt and shorts she’s been sleeping in. 

Her hair is tumbling around her shoulders, and Scott takes a second to pretend they’re anywhere but here. They could be back, one or five or ten years ago, in a house in a city, with mains electricity and running water and neighbours who you can at least partially trust. A different world, where there are no undead monsters outside and they have to wake up early to go to work. 

“What is it?” She asks, and Scott’s eyes flicker to the couch where Cassie is sleeping. 

“Your cough.” He's been wanting to talk to her about it for days. Partly it’s wanting to repay her for everything she’s done. Mostly, he’s just concerned about her. 

“What about it?”

“It sounds…  _ bad _ ,” he’s leaning out of the doorway out of the tiny bedroom, fingers gently tapping the soft wood of the frame. 

“It’s fine. It’s just a cold,” she brushes him off, but she’s standing so close that he can hear the crackle of infection in her chest when she takes a breath.  

“Look, I know you’re leaving, I know you have some place to be, and I won’t stop you from going. But just stay, a couple more days. We’ll go out and get you antibiotics tomorrow and then you can leave when this starts to clear up.”

Hope hesitates, looking down at her bare feet. “There’s no more antibiotics. At least not in this town,” she tells him. “I searched three stores before the pharmacy I found Cassie in. And we gave you the last box. You were the medical priority, it made the most sense.”

Scott feels his heart drop to his stomach. She gave him the only tablets she could find, with no reason or logic for doing so. 

“Hope,  _ why _ ?” 

He wants the tablets back. He wants to push them into her hand and make her promise to take them. This odd woman who doesn’t say much, who is in the middle of some mysterious quest which will probably get her killed. This stranger who saved his life. She’s all hard edges and determined silences and seeing her like this, late at night, feels wrong, like she doesn’t quite fit with the picture of soft t shirts and softer hair. But he guesses that was her life once, not so long ago. This is where they should all belong, not out there with bruised skin and adrenaline fuelling them. His fifteen-year-old shouldn’t know how to shoot a gun or throw knives with perfect accuracy.  _ Scott  _ shouldn’t know what it feels like to feel the life force leaving someone underneath his own hands. But this is where they are. 

“For Cassie,” Hope answers, after a long silence. There’s reluctance in her voice, but no regret. 

“What if you’re really sick, Hope? What if you… what if you die? You’d take that risk for me, for her?”

Hope studies him, and the bruise on her cheek is a faded yellow now, the dirt washed away too. There’s enough water right now for them to take the occasional wash and still get enough to drink. 

“She’s just a kid,” Hope shrugs, and she seems, suddenly, to be standing very close to Scott. As if the room has been shrinking by increments over the course of their exchange. 

He reaches a hand out, brushes his index finger along the bruise on her bone. “I’ll get you those antibiotics, Hope,” his voice is softer now, and not just because he’s afraid of waking Cassie. “I’ll find some. Let me find some. Let me help you, this time. Then you can go.”

She frowns a little, but doesn’t move away from his touch, and Scott can almost see the cogs turning in her mind. She’s weighing up her options, using a scientific approach. They’ve never talked about their lives, he doesn’t even know her last name or where she’s from, but she approaches problems like a scientist, so he’ll assume that’s what she is, until she says otherwise. 

“We can look tomorrow,” Hope concedes. “But I’m leaving the day after. Pills or no pills.”

“Ok. Ok,” Scott agrees, happy to have got this. Happy to be guaranteed another twenty-four hours of her. 

They look at each other for another beat, sizing one another up, or memorising each other’s faces. Scott isn’t sure. And then, just like that, she’s stepping back. Scott’s hand falls back to his side. The air feels cooler. 

  
  


They don’t make it out to the town the next morning. Hope leaves to check the perimeters and returns ten minutes later, bursting into the cabin and making Scott and Cassie jump, freezing mid action. Cassie’s cutting up tomatoes, Scott’s working on ammunition inventory, both bleary eyed. 

There’s a perimeter breach. A whole horde of zombies headed their way, passing through the woods, some cruel twist of fate bringing them down this path. The woods are wide, the area vast. Scott and Cassie have had almost half a year of peace here, zombies stumbling through occasionally, no more than five at a time. Scott guesses this is the end of the line for good luck. Seven billion people on the earth, most turned to gruesome monsters. They were bound to run into a horde eventually. 

“What do we do?” Cassie’s backed herself into the corner of the kitchen, as if being out in open space, even in the cabin, is now too much. 

Scott looks at Hope, and somehow knows they’re a unit now. In this together. The only wait out of this is to work as a team. 

“We have to go,” Hope declares, and Scott’s reluctant, eyes moving to the bathroom door. There’s no windows there. They could barricade themselves in, wait out the storm. Hope’s breathing is shallow and marred with crackles from running here from the perimeter. He’s not sure she’ll make it if they have to flee now. “No, Scott,” Hope reads his thoughts, shaking her head vehemently. There’s something on her face he understands. It’s not an emotion he has a name for, rather it’s a gut feeling passed from person to person. Scott can tell that everything in Hope’s body, the blood in her veins, is screaming at her to get out of here, to run. And her instincts kept her alive out there, wandering the country for almost a year. 

On the other hand, this is his daughter’s  _ life  _ he’s putting on the line here. If Hope’s wrong...if they leave and it turns out to be a bad call...her instincts will mean nothing, then. 

But Hope’s looking at him with desperation, and Cassie’s relying on him to know what to do. He’s been right to trust Hope so far. So he gives a singular nod, and sets things into motion. 

 

Scott and Cassie have kept their essentials in backpacks since they got here, a large bag filled with food in the pantry. Just in case. They grab them now as Hope pulls her bag into her back, checking Scott’s gun is loaded, pushing her knives into the slots on her belt. 

“Come on,” Hope reaches a hand for Cassie, pulls her towards the door as Scott picks up the food bag. 

He pauses, allowing himself three seconds to look around the space he and Cassie have called home the the past months. The terrible crayon art on the walls, the home grown tomatoes laying forgotten on the table. But he can hear the groaning outside as it draws closer, and Cassie’s reaching for him with her free hand. Scott reaches back, allows himself to be pulled outside, and says goodbye to someplace like home. 

 

They run up the mountain. It’s slippery underfoot, a little muddy, loose twigs and leaves making it difficult to gain traction. The groaning continues behind them, sometimes getting closer, other times far away. The zombies were all human once, still live in the shells of human bodies, so they are no faster or more agile than Scott, Hope, and Cassie. No more able to scale the hill. What they  _ are  _ is immune to pain and exhaustion. Whilst Scott’s calf muscles burn with every step, the still-healing cut covering the length of his shin stinging every time he picks his foot up, the zombies feel nothing. They’ve picked up the scent of human flesh and they’re not about to stop now. 

Hope’s struggling. It’s not like she’ll admit it, she’s still keeping up the pace, but she’s turned whiter than Scott’s ever seen her, breaths sputtering, coughing on every second intake. Truthfully, he’s not sure how much longer she can keep this up. 

The three of them dart left through the trees, escaping into a slight clearing, and that’s when Scott sees the river. It’s not too wide, maybe ten feet, doesn’t look too fast flowing as it carves it’s way down the mountainside. 

“The river,” Scott gasps, gesturing to it wildly. 

Hope’s too out of breath to reply, but nods vigorously, so they head for it, dragging Cassie with them, jumping into the water and wading to the other side. Scott has no evidence that this will work, but it worked with police dogs on cop tv shows, so  _ maybe  _ it will throw the zombies off their scents, at least a little bit. He’s willing to try anything at this point. They heave themselves out on the other side, no time to recover on the river bank. 

“C’mon,” Scott pulls Cassie up, moving on to grip Hope’s hand and tug her to her feet. She struggles, but is up and adjusting her backpack before the groans have drawn any nearer to them. 

Scott grips her fingers, following Cassie’s lead as she swings more to the left, running out of the eyeline of the zombies. 

“You’re ok,” he tells Hope, squeezing her hand tightly, “you can do this.” She shoots him a grateful glance, squeezing back. They both know she has no choice. She can do this, or she can die. 

 

They make it to some kind of shelter, surrounded by silence and birdsong. It’s a beat-up blue van, not something that Scott would have really classed as shelter in his old life, but it’s out of the open and large enough for all three of them to sit in the back of comfortably, getting their bearings and their breath back and recovering from the shock of it all. 

“Are you ok?” Scott checks on Cassie first, scanning her with his eyes for injury. 

“I’m fine dad,” she pants, side-eyeing Hope, nodding at her, telling Scott that she’s the one he should be worrying about right now. 

“Hope?” He rounds on her, lifting her chin. 

“Give me a  _ second _ ,” she gets out between breaths, one hand pressed to her chest. Scott pulls his hand back, waits kneeling in front of her, half focused on the sounds outside and half on Hope and Cassie, breaths slowly growing steadier. 

“Ok. I’m fine, you can stop looking at me like that,” Hope says, one or ten or thirty minutes later. However long it was, it felt  _ too  _ long for Scott. 

“Yeah, you seem  _ great _ ,” Scott retorts, and Hope hits him lightly on the arm. “That the best you can do?”

“You can’t handle the best I can do.”

Scott smiles. Hope might still be wincing in pain, but she’s ok for now. They sit in the quiet for a little longer. 

“So where do we go now?” Cassie asks, once they all feel a little calmer. No groaning coming from outside. 

“Well,” Hope starts, hand finally moving from her chest, “I know where I’m going.”

Scott and Cassie exchange a glance. His first instinct is to go with Hope, find her some antibiotics along the way, watch each other’s backs. He thinks they’re starting to become something, the three of them, something like a team. Or rather, there’s the flicker of it, the three of them beginning to turn from together by coincidence, to together because it works better. But Scott’s not going to do that if it’s going to risk Cassie. He wants her to be all in on this too; needs to know she’s ready to handle a journey, ready to fight if it comes to it. 

“Where?” Cassie asks, sitting up straighter. Scott takes that as a sign up. 

Hope hesitates. “I shouldn’t involve you in this. I’m not supposed to. My dad…” she stops, and Scott’s interest is piqued. It’s the first scrap of information she’s given. 

“We just escaped the jaws of death. I think you can trust us, newbie,” Scott teases. 

“Newbie?” Hope wrinkles her nose. 

“You’ve got nothing on these fifteen years,” Scott holds out a hand for Cassie to fist bump, and somehow, in the midst of all of the chaos, makes everyone feel normal again. 

“Ok, ok,” she rolls her eyes. 

“But seriously, let us come with you. We can have each other’s backs,” Scott says, and Hope surveys him carefully, considering. 

“Can you both keep up?” She asks, doubtfully. 

“Hope, we  _ both  _ outran you on that hill,” Cassie points out. 

“Yeah, but I’m… not at full capacity right now.”

“We can help you get there again,” Scott suggests. 

Hope sighs. “If either of you give me  _ any  _ reason to doubt my trust in you, I’m leaving. There’s no second chances.”

“You can trust us,” Cassie promises, with a reassuring smile. 

“She’s right,” Scott reiterates. 

“Then you better listen carefully.”

 

Hope tells them a story, in as few words as she can, about her mother and father, and a scientist named Bruce Banner. She tells them about the thirteen weeks at the start of all of this she spent locked in a research facility with a handful of survivors from the science community, about the tests they carried out on infected blood and the back-channel network they kept with other research facilities across the country. She tells them about the radiation in the bloodstream, the fact that all of the connected facilities eventually came to the same conclusion. The fact that this conclusion came with the potential, the edges, the ghost of an outline of a cure. 

There were ten connected facilities at the start, Hope tells them, but by the time her Los Angeles facility fell, it was one of only three. One was taken out by an accidental fire, one by disease. The rest were taken by the undead. Hope doesn’t tell them what happened to hers, doesn’t discuss her parents again. Cassie and Scott fill in the blanks. 

“We shortlisted five scientists who could help us,” Hope says, as excitement burns in Scott’s stomach. “There were more, of course, but research facilities kept falling. We got to five before mine...well, we got to five.”

“Five. Five, that’s better than nothing, that’s promising,” Scott nods, his imagination running away with him as he imagines what this could mean. 

“It  _ was  _ five,” Hope stops him in his tracks. “One lives in China, another in Alaska. I’ve looked for two, and they’re both… well they’re not an option anymore.”

Scott’s heart sinks to the bottom of his worn out boots. “So that still leaves one, right?”

“Yeah. One. One last option.”

“So where is he?” Cassie wants to know. 

Hope takes a deep breath, seemingly reluctant to answer. 

“Hope?” Scott presses her. 

“On the day of the outbreak, Bruce Banner was on a working visit to a disease centre. The centre had a strict lockdown policy in place, so we have no reason to believe he ever left that building,” she pauses. “The centre is around 500 miles away from this very spot.”

“Five- I’m sorry, Hope, did you say  _ five hundred miles _ ?” Scott splutters. “As in far,  _ far  _ away from Oregon?”

She swallows, “yes. Five hundred miles. East.”

“That’s like a  _ month’s  _ walk away,” Cassie groans, head sinking to her hands. 

“Give or take. Less if I can find a bike, or a gas station with something left in it, or a horse.”

“You’re going to ride a  _ horse _ for five hundred miles?” Scott throws his hands up in the air. 

“If I have to!” Hope says through gritted teeth. “I have to at least  _ look  _ for him, Scott. This is saving humanity we’re talking about. The rest of human history. Which I might be able to help save. Don’t you think it’s worth four weeks, for that?”

Scott lowers his hands. “It’s not just four weeks, Hope. It’s four weeks out  _ there _ . In case you hadn’t noticed, there are literal undead monsters walking around. And the ones who are still alive aren’t much better.”

“So stay here! Maybe the zombies didn’t tear apart your cabin. Maybe you can fix it up. Stay here and live your half life pretending nothing’s wrong, it makes no difference to me,” she stands up rapidly, almost hitting her head on the ceiling of the van, swaying as she gets to her feet so she has to close her eyes for a second. 

“Hope?” Scott’s concerned, getting to his feet too, one hand on Hope’s shoulder. 

“I’m  _ fine _ ,” she brushes him away, pops open the back door of the van. “I just need some air,” she says, jumping out. 

Scott stands frozen, listening to the crunch of Hope’s boots on the gravel of the driveway the van’s parked on, letting the last ten minutes sink in. 

“Daddy,” Cassie snaps him out of it. “We have to go with her.”

“The whole five hundred miles?” It almost seems unthinkable. If he didn’t have Cassie with him, then sure, of course he’d go. But she’s far too precious for him to risk. 

“Yeah. We all know how to fight, how to survive out there,” Cassie gestures towards the forest. “She saved us, remember? We owe her. And she’s sick, dad. She needs us.”

Scott takes a breath, mind whirring, trying desperately to figure out what the right move is. Staying still, staying out of the way has worked for them so far. It’s been the right thing to do. 

But  _ has it _ , he asks himself. Sure, they’re still here, still breathing, still thinking, still surviving. But maybe that’s all it is anymore, survival. Living off of scraps in a tiny cabin, never seeing any other people, living in constant fear. They’re alive, sure, but is that enough? Is this the way Scott wants Cassie to grow up? Or should he go with Hope, try to find a better world, somewhere they can really be happy? Try to give Cassie the shot at a happy life?

“We’ll be ok. We can get there, I know it,” Cassie insists. 

If Cassie thinks they can do it, then Scott is kind of inclined to believe her. She’s one of the strongest people he’s known, pre and post apocalypse, and if she believes in them, then who is Scott to challenge that? Why should he stand in the way of a brave new future?

“Hey, Hope?” He calls, sticking his head out of the van and finding her standing by the tree line. “We’re coming. We’re in.”

Her smile is back, and though it still doesn’t quite reach her eyes, it’s solid and real. Stronger than the ghost of happiness he’s seen before. Stronger than the monsters around them, the lives they left behind, the blood soaked past and unsteady feet of the future. It’s human. And that makes this risk worth it. 

  
  


So, they walk. Hope helps Cassie read the dog eared map she keeps in her backpack, hands her a chipped compass, and Cassie leads the way along the dirt track that carves the mountain in half. Scott keeps his gun loaded and ready and senses sharp. Hope walks swinging knives in both hands. They share a pack of overly crumbly beef jerky between them, sipping water slowly, rationing it out. The sun moves higher in the sky, temperature creeping up. They stick to the shade. Hope’s chest crackles, Scott’s leg twinges, Cassie picks at the scab on her arm. They keep walking. 

 

It takes them two days and four zombie kills (all Hope’s) before they reach something like civilisation. It’s a shopping mall, some place out of town, and Scott can picture the kind of people who used to come here. It’s close to a large town, a sprawling suburbia, and his theories are confirmed when they observe the parking lot from the edge of the mountain, filled with minivans and SUVs with plates from a year or two before the outbreak. They watch for thirty minutes, waiting for any sign of humans or hordes of zombies. Scott stumbled across a place like this once before, only to find it having been taken over by some kind of gang, almost being shot on sight. But this one sits still and empty. 

They’re in and out in fifteen minutes, according to the cracked face of Scott’s watch, having picked through the remains of the shattered stores. By some grace of god, one’s a camping store, and they find protein bars and electrolyte-filled drinks and tablets to sterilise water. Cassie and Scott stock up, sneaking back outside to wait for Hope. She’s five minutes later than they are, having split up to look for what they needed inside. It made most sense. It didn’t stop Scott from feeling the desperate need to go with her, regardless. He paces the front of the building, counting the seconds until she reappears, only taking a proper breath when she does. 

Hope brandishes a solitary pack of antibiotics proudly, and Scott’s so happy he could hug her, takes a step forward to do just that before remembering that they’re probably not there yet. He settles for clapping her on the shoulder. Hope takes the medication. They go back to the mountain trail. 

 

They keep walking. Days keep ticking past. They try to sleep out of the open, picking barns or abandoned RVs in lots, occasionally risking breaking into a house. The first time they do this it’s an old farmhouse, the shell of an elderly couple attempting to bite out their throats the second they step inside the front door. Hope takes the woman, a knife to the skull, Scott shooting out the man in one fluid motion. They’re a team now, all three of them, pooling resources and communicating wordlessly, figuring out the safest way to get from A to B. 

Hope starts to teach them martial arts, they find a field of sunflowers all taller than Scott, a cat follows them for five miles, they creep past a huge car wreck on a too-busy, too-risky road at dusk, trying not to listen to the zombie shrieks from mangled metal. They put one foot in front of the other. They stay alive. 

“At least we get to see the country, you know,” Scott points out, late on night seven, sitting on the ground outside the moving van they’ll be sleeping in. There’s nothing inside it, but it’s spacious and has a door that closes securely. 

“That’s what you’re taking from this?” Hope raises her eyebrows, dropping down to sit beside him. Cassie’s sound asleep inside, had barely been able to keep her eyes open for the final hour of their walk. 

“Sure. It’s one of those things you always plan to do but never get around to it. We’re getting around to it now,” Scott shrugs. 

They’re somewhere deep in Idaho now, having spent the day walking along a long, straight, country road, passing acres of unkempt crops, fields glowing with flowers, clusters of cows keeping to themselves, eating grass like the world is unchanged. 

“You have a weird way of seeing the world, you know that?” Hope tilts her head at him, hands busy unwrapping a protein bar. Her chest is starting to improve, no longer crackling every time she takes a breath. They haven’t seen any undead all day. 

“What can I say? My elementary school teachers labelled me ‘creatively minded’,” Scott grins, reaching out and breaking off the top of Hope’s protein bar whilst she’s busy frowning at him. 

“Hey!” She reaches for it too late as Scott tosses it into his mouth. 

“You snooze, you lose.”

“Just you wait, Lang. Just you wait.”

They sit and chew in a comfortable silence. It’s so dark out that they can see the stars, something Scott’s used to by now. It took some adjusting, knowing that he could look up anytime and see the entire twinkling universe blinking down at him. But there’s no more light pollution. No more smog obscuring the sky. Just a planet full of dying beings, haunted by the already dead. Illuminated by the sky. Scott knows that the stars are far enough away that the light he sees from them was shed long ago. Some of those stars might not even exist anymore, it might be their final rays of light making their way towards earth right now. It’s comforting to know that it will be a very, very long time before the starlight hitting the iris of anything on earth is as old as the outbreak. 

“Cassie’s a great kid,” Hope comments, voice soft. 

“Yeah. She is,” Scott will always agree with that. 

“Did her mom… did she…” Hope doesn’t need to finish that sentence. Scott knows that she’s asking. 

“She died in the initial outbreak,” Scott says, the memory still raw and weeping and agonising. He may not have been with Maggie anymore, but god, he still loved her. They were raising Cassie together, he would always love her. Not the same as when they were together, but still, some kind of love. “With Cassie’s step-dad. Cassie locked herself in the bathroom until I got there to...well, to get her out.” Scott still doesn’t like to think about that day. He’s certain he’ll have nightmares about it until the day he dies, a week or a month or fifty years from now. There’s no telling when that’ll be anymore. 

Hope doesn’t respond right away, but Scott feels her tugging at his hand where it rests on his knee. Their fingers tangle together, and her head lands on his shoulder, hair soft against his neck. 

“My parents sacrificed themselves for me. At the research centre,” she says, eventually. “And every damn day I wish it was me instead.  _ God,  _ I wish it was me instead. This world, Scott. I swear sometimes this world is going to eat us alive.”

Scott’s pretty sure that enough pieces of his heart have broken off by now that there can’t possibly be any left. But still, there’s agony in his chest, and he’d give anything to go back, just for an hour, a  _ minute.  _ Back to his old life in his old home, pick Cassie up from school and take her for ice cream, watch her soccer games with Maggie and Paxton. Find Hope, wherever she was in the country, living her ordinary life. Maybe he’d find her at work or in a bar, their eyes meeting across the room. He’d raise his glass at her, she would shoot him that smile, wide enough to win a war, and then he’d turn and walk away. That would be enough. 

For now, he settles for raising his free hand to her face, brushing her dark hair behind her ear, and pressing a kiss to the top of her head. She sighs, squeezes his hand, and they sit together in the black, ears filled with silence. 

 

They walk for two more days, any suggestions of trying to find a functional car shot down. The roads are too blocked, and cars are too noisy. Instead, they wander corn fields and valleys, trace the circumference of a lake, following the roads where it’s quiet. They pass creepy abandoned playgrounds, rows of houses, ivy-laden cottages on farms. There’s a close call with a group of three zombies in the middle of a forest, appearing seemingly out of nowhere. Cassie, screaming, stabs one straight through the eye, and Hope dispatches the other two. This time, Cassie doesn’t cry after her kill, simply staring in shock at the green-tinged blood on her knife, the rotting flesh of the zombie. Scott isn’t sure what to do, but Hope puts her arm around her and tells her she did a good job, and that it’s ok to feel whatever she’s feeling, and Cassie wipes the knife down, double checks the compass, and they’re back on their way. 

 

They’re still, somehow, in Idaho days later when their trip is interrupted. They’re in a larger town, something they try to avoid, but it’s far quicker to go through this one than try to navigate the mountains around it. 

There’s a giant potato in the street, captivating all three of them. It’s fake, made of some sort of plastic, hollowed out in the middle, made to celebrate the fact that some iconically large potato was dug up here in the 1960s. 

“See, Hope,” Scott pokes her as they approach it, “we’re basically tourists. How many people would drive right past this gem? Look how much we get to see on foot.” His sentiment doesn’t hold as much weight as it might have had he not been whispering, as they do in all towns they pass through. It’s not worth the risk. 

“It’s just a big potato,” Hope points out, but this does nothing to eviscerate the glee on both Scott and Cassie’s faces. 

“Let’s climb in it,” Cassie suggests, taking off at a run. Scott follows behind, slower with the weight of the food he’s carrying. 

Hope watches as they scale the potato with an excessive amount of struggling up the textured plastic, dumps her bag by her feet and stretches her back out. For the first time since the outbreak, she wishes she had a camera. It’s strange, developing attachments to new people in the aftermath of the end of the world. She thought she was done with that. She thought she’d try and find Banner by herself, and once that was over, success or not, she’d spend the rest of her days feeling sad and angry and lonely and heartbroken. She was wrong, she guesses, warmth seeping into her bones, unable to stop the smile from settling on her face. 

She isn’t sure how she feels about them yet, doesn’t know what it means that she’s happiest when she’s beside Scott, or that her hand feels right in his. Doesn’t know what it means that she feels proud when Cassie hits the target first time with her knives or when she comes up with a particularly brilliant idea. She’s never had people like this before. She’s certainly never had people who would willingly and joyously climb into a giant potato just for the hell of it. 

The fondness turns to fear in the snap of a second. There’s a sound, somewhere close. Hope freezes, trying to hear past the muffled giggles coming from inside the potato. It’s not the groan of a zombie, or the death chorus of a horde. It’s...it’s human. It’s strangled and desperate and  _ almost  _ animalistic. But not quite. Scott and Cassie suddenly feel much too far away. 

“Scott,” Hope reaches for her backpack, pulling it back on, taking giant steps towards the potato. “ _ Scott _ !” She doesn't know what’s going on, but it feels a bit like the street is closing in on her. “Scott! Cassie!” She reaches the potato, knocks on the side, waits a second too long for Scott’s head to poke out the top of the plastic. 

“Hope?” His smile melts as he sees her face. “Hope, what is it?” And he’s scrambling out of the potato in record time, his hands finding her face, cupping it carefully. “What happened? What is it? Cassie,” he glances behind him, hands still on Hope’s face, “get out of there.”

“Dad?” Cassie appears. 

“There’s someone screaming,” Hope explains, bringing a finger to her lips. Cassie jumps from the potato, landing on her feet, and all three of them stand stock still in the street. 

The screaming starts again. The voice sounds young, like they’re maybe Cassie’s age, and Hope’s heart clenches painfully in her chest. 

“Daddy?” Cassie clutched her father’s shoulder as Scott drops his hands from Hope’s face, one hand moving to grip her hand, the other holding Cassie’s. 

Hope is torn. The survival part of her is telling her to run, as fast and as far away as she can. The  _ human  _ part of her is telling her to do something. To run towards the screaming and fight tooth and nail until it stops. Whether or not that means sacrificing herself. Cassie and Scott complicate things, because, like it or not, any decision she makes now impacts them. And more than anything, she wants to keep them safe, which is a revelation in itself. Hope pushes it away into the depths of her mind, decides it's something to try and figure out another time. 

Hope and Scott look at each other, and without saying anything, know they’ve made their decision. The world, these days, is cruel and cold and every day is made up of one hundred different life and death decisions. If they don’t listen to their human sides, then what’s the point? What’s the point in being alive, if they’re just going to exist?

“Cassie, get back in the potato,” Scott lets go of Cassie’s hand, snaps his fingers at his daughter. 

“What? Dad,  _ no _ ! I’m coming with you! I can help, I can fight!” Cassie protests. 

“Peanut,” and Scott’s voice is breaking, “please. Please just do this for me.”

“We don’t know what’s out there, Cassie,” Hope says, and Scott squeezes her hand thank you, then lets go to hug Cassie tightly. 

“We’ll be right back. Just stay there, stay hidden, stay quiet.”

“ _ Dad _ .”

“ _ Please _ ?”

Cassie stares him down for a second, eyes swimming with tears, before turning and scrambling back into the potato. 

“I love you. I love you so much,” Scott tells her, and then he and Hope are dropping their bags and running as fast as they can towards the source of the noise. 

 

They find the source of the screaming too soon and not soon enough, a group of zombies surrounding the burnt out shell of a car, alone in a street of boarded up shops. There’s not enough of them for it to be considered a horde, but too many for Scott and Hope to easily tackle by themselves. 

Scott cusses under his breath as they stand in an adjacent alley, hovering and trying to decide what to do. Hope’s ready to try just about anything to get whoever is stuck inside that car out. 

“Ok. Ok, we need to draw them away from the car,” Scott whispers desperately. 

“How?” Hope’s mind has gone blank at the one time she needs it to function. 

“Uh-” Scott looks around them, and Hope follows his gaze to a metal dustbin lid leaning up against the wall. “I think I can use this.”

“What?”

“And...and this,” there’s a broken glass bottle. Scott picks them up, experimentally slowly hitting the two together. “That should be loud enough?”

“Scott?” Hope’s stitching the pieces of Scott’s plan together in her mind. 

“I’m going to draw them away, and run around the block. I’ll meet you back here in two minutes, ok?”

“No. No, it’s too dangerous! Let me draw them away. Your leg-”

“Is fine. It’s fine. Let me do this, Hope. I’ll draw them away, you get that person out of the car, ok?” 

“I-“ she’s about to protest further, make Scott understand that he can’t do this, but the screams get louder, escalate a notch. 

“Hope. I’ll see you in two minutes,” Scott pauses, one foot out of the alley, and then turns back and plants a kiss on her forehead. 

Hope’s hands knit into the chest of his shirt, and her eyes flicker upwards to meet his. She doesn’t want to lose him. Can’t bear the thought of it. It’s too much to think about, too much to even consider for the whisper of a second. 

“Two minutes,” he whispers. “And if not...if not, get Cassie and go. Ok? Ok, Hope?”

Not ok. Not ok because he has to come back. So why is she nodding?  _ No.  _ “Ok.”

“Two minutes,” he kisses her forehead again, and then he’s leaving, so fast that he’s torn from her grip. Hope wants to scream at him, run after him, never let him out of her sight again. But they’re a team now, and this is their game plan. Hope’s just one moving part of this. Has to do her bit. 

Instead of running after Scott, like her instincts are telling her to, she stands with her back pressed against the alley wall, listening to Scott making as much noise as he possibly can, watching the group of zombies running past the alley entrance. Instead of screaming to distract them from Scott and draw them towards herself, she waits for the groans to grow slightly quieter before running as fast as she can towards the car. She finds a teenage boy inside, still screaming, covering his head with his hands. He’s holding a broken knife, face and arms spattered with blood.  

“Hey.  _ Hey _ !” Hope reaches in through the busted window, shaking the kid’s shoulder. She was right, he can’t be older than Cassie by more than a year or two. “Kid!”

He stops screaming, opens his eyes, and they’re filled with terror. “Is-is it over? Am I dead?”

“No,” Hope frowns. “You’re fine. But you need to get out of this car right now.”

The kid freezes for a second, sizing Hope up, before pushing himself into a sitting position. “Ma’am… ma’am thank you.  _ Thank you.  _ I’m Peter Parker, I-I tried as hard as I could, there were too many of them, I-”

“That’s great Peter Parker,” Hope nods quickly, “but we have to go now.”

“Oh! I’m sorry, I’m sorry ma’am.”

“Stop calling me that. My name’s Hope,” she grips Peter’s shoulder, helping him wriggle out through the car window. 

“It’s- it’s good to meet you, Hope,” his voice is shaking a little. 

“What are you  _ doing  _ out here?” She asks, pulling him by the elbow back into the alley. 

“I’ve come from the Air Force base. It was my turn for a supply run,” he shrugs. “I’m fast, so I always offer.”

“Air Force base?”

“Uh, yeah. About ten miles that way,” Peter points vaguely north. “There’s a group of us holed up there.”

Hope’s mind is working overtime, a thousand questions bubbling to the surface, but right now she can’t process anything going on. Because surely,  _ surely  _ it’s been two minutes by now? 

“How long have you been there?” Hope asks, barely focusing on the kid as they stand at the end of the alley. 

“Five months. I think. Since the winter started. It’s hard to keep track of time these days.”

“Yeah. Yeah, you don’t say,” Hope runs a hand through her hair, paces back up the other end of the alley. Maybe Scott’s waiting somewhere around there?

“Uh… ma’am- I’m sorry, Hope. Hope, what are we doing?”

“Waiting,” Hope says, pacing. “For my… my friend. He drew the zombies away from you. He should be back here by now.”

“Oh. Oh, ok. Listen, thank you so much for saving me. I didn’t know if I was gonna get out of that one, and MJ and May would’ve killed me if I’d died. You can come back to the base with me if you want? We have a little food and plenty of water.”

“What?”

“Uh...you can come back to the base. Your friend can come too.”

“Oh. Right.” Something in the back of Hope’s mind is considering it. But just like the rest of the events of the past five minutes, she pushes it away and paces. 

 

Hope keeps pacing. Time, as much as she wills it not to, keeps moving forwards. She checks the nearby buildings. She drags the kid around the block Scott ran around. She even yells his name, as risky as that is. Nothing. Two minutes. Two minutes, he  _ promised.  _

“Um, Ms Hope?” Peter looks a little awkward as they retreat back to the alley. “Don’t you think we should be going? Like, we can come back! Of course we’ll come back! But it’s not super safe here and it’s going to be getting dark soon.”

 

_ Two minutes.  _

 

But Hope has an agreement to keep. Something she’s got to do, because… because her and Scott and Cassie, they’re a team. And this is what teams do. She has to do the hardest thing she’s done since walking out of that damned research facility. She has to think logically about this, think like the scientist she’s been her whole life. She has to get Cassie and walk away. She has to leave Scott. 

 

_ Two minutes.  _

 

She’s so angry that tears spring to her eyes, pushing them away with the heel of her hand, mad at Scott for volunteering to do this, mad at him for doing it  _ wrong _ , mad at him for leaving her here. And somehow it seems alien that she ever travelled the country without him. Seems impossible that she ever will again. She thinks she’ll be waiting for the rest of her days for those two minutes to finally be up. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Introducing a random selection of Avengers I felt like writing.

Hope leaves a note. It’s the only thing she can think to do, only way she can tear herself away from the alley that’s going to be etched into her memories for the foreseeable future. If it wasn’t for Cassie, she’d stay. She’d search this whole town for Scott, every road, every building, every room. But it’s the thought of the teenager hiding in a darkening street by herself, scared and alone, that makes Hope etch a note on the crumbling brick wall in spray paint. She can’t stand the thought of Cassie ever being sad or alone, knows she’s all Scott has in the world. And now, terrifyingly, all Hope has too. She’d thought she was done with people, thought she was alone and that it was always going to be that way. 

Having people to care about is far scarier than having no one. 

But it’s far better, too. 

 

Hope finds Cassie with ease, relief flooding her veins as she pulls her out of her hiding spot. Scott might be gone, for now (not forever. No way forever.), but Cassie’s still here. And Hope’s going to keep her safe if it’s the last thing she does. She’ll keep Cassie alive if it kills her, die the way she was supposed to go with her parents. 

Telling Cassie that Scott is lost is one of the top three hardest things Hope has done since the outbreak, holding her tight as she sobs into Hope’s collarbone in the middle of the street. Hope’s pretty sure this is something Cassie needs to do, needs to get out of her system before they can leave, so they stand silently until she’s done, neither Hope nor Peter interrupting her. (And, if she’s being honest, Hope wants to stall for as long as possible, stand here as the world darkens around them, just in case Scott is seconds away from stepping around the corner.) (He doesn’t show up.)

 

Peter Parker leads them through the wasted streets, quick on his feet and skittish, carrying his lumpy looking backpack high on his back like it weighs nothing. 

“Where are we going?” Cassie asks, voice shaking. She’s stopped crying, eyes dry, a haunted expression taken up residence on her face. 

“An Air Force base. Just for tonight, ok? Then we’ll find your dad. I promise you, Cassie. I promise we’ll get him back,” Hope tells her, as Peter jogs across the street in front of them and starts to scale a wall. 

“It’s just over here,” he tells them, tangling his hands in the branches at the top of the brick, pulling himself up. 

“What, the base?” Hope asks, doubtful, wondering why in the hell she's trusting this kid anyway. Wondering if she should be grabbing Cassie’s hand and running in the opposite direction. Because her decisions are not her own anymore. She’s got to do what’s best for the two of them, got to assess each situation like a responsible adult and act accordingly. If she doesn’t, they’ll both end up dead. 

“Nah. Our ride,” Peter grins, his crooked smile lighting up his face, piercing through the smudges of dirt and the thin scratch on his forehead. 

“Hope?” Cassie frowns, small and uncertain, looking to Hope for reassurance. Cassie’s tall, and Hope thinks she looks a little older than her fifteen years, but in that moment she’s just a lost kid, looking to an adult to know what’s best for her. 

Hope remembers, suddenly, being five years old and losing her parents in a shopping mall, feeling absolute terror for the fifteen minutes she wandered around looking for them and the ten she sat at the security desk waiting for them to find her. It was lonely, plain and simple, like she’d surely never find them again. Like the adults she trusted and relied on so very much had disappeared off the face of the earth, and she didn’t know who to turn to or trust or ask for help anymore. 

It’s the same type of gut wrenching, bone deep fear she felt on the day she lost them for real, watching them sacrifice themselves so that their daughter might live. 

It’s the same kind of fear she can see in Cassie’s eyes now that Scott’s gone, now that everything seems hopeless and cold. Hope’s not going to risk letting her down. 

“Come on,” she holds out her hand, letting Cassie grip it tightly. A wordless promise. They find the right footholds in the wall and pull themselves over. Together, they’re going to stay alive. 

 

Peter’s ride home is no less than a  _ horse.  _ An idea that Hope has toyed with but never seen through, partly because she hadn’t come across any horses and didn’t have the time or inclination to look for one. Her two good feet served her well enough. 

The horse is a shire, pure white, so tall that Hope has to tilt her head all the way back to look at its face. 

“We should all fit on him,” Peter says, not filling Hope with confidence. 

“ _ Should? _ ” Hope raises her eyebrows, arms folded across her chest. 

“Thor and Carol rode him with Groot once. So I think we should be fine. Just...yeah, we’ll be ok,” Peter nods. 

Hope turns to Cassie, finds her holding a hand up to stroke down the horse’s nose. “What’s his name?” She asks, eyes fixed on the horse’s. 

“Pegasus,” Peter says, fiddling with the chunky leather saddle. 

“Like the flying horse in the myth?” Cassie asks. 

“Uh, yeah. Yeah, I guess so. He’s Val’s horse, so she can tell you more.”

“Who are these people you keep mentioning?” Hope wants to know, wondering if they’re people back at the base, and just how many people there  _ are  _ on the base. 

“You’ll meet them when we get there,” Peter assures her. “It’s ok. It’s ok, they’re good people. They’ll want to help,” he offers Hope a reassuring smile, and though she has no reason to beyond gut instinct, she trusts him. 

So, after far too long trying to get onto the back of Pegasus, the three of them make their way north. 

 

It’s dark when they reach the base, the brightness of the moon leading the way up a tarmac path, weeds snaking their way through the cracks and catching in the light. There’s a tall metal fence around the perimeter of the base, barbed wire curled at the top, a few ghostly shapes staggering around at the edge on the other side of the base, far away enough that they only make Hope feel slightly uneasy, layers of fence between them. Pegasus comes to a stop at a large gate, a figure stepping out of the shadows to greet them. 

“Peter.” It’s a woman, a long sword in her hand glinting in the moonlight, braids in her hair. “We thought you weren’t coming back.” She has an English accent and a stare that Hope’s sure could kill. 

“I’m sorry, Val, I got into some trouble with some zombies, and a car, and it- it got pretty bad out there!” Peter rubs the back of his neck anxiously, one hand still holding Pegasus’ reigns. “But I got what we needed! These two saved me,” he gestures to Hope and Cassie, seated behind him, with a thumb. 

The woman’s eyes dart to them, dark and unforgiving, as she raises her sword a little, almost unconsciously. Hope’s grip tightens on Cassie’s shoulder. 

“Who are you?” The woman asks, addressing Hope. 

“They lost someone,” Peter answers instead. “They lost someone saving me, so I told them they could come back here for the night, until it’s safe to go looking again. I figured- I guess… that’s ok, right?”

“This isn’t your base, Peter. You’re not supposed to just invite back people back,” the woman says, but there’s a hint of amusement in her voice. “You and your daughter can stay here for the night,” she says, and neither Hope nor Cassie bother to correct her, feeling too grateful. “But don’t try and steal anything. You won’t make it far if you do.” And Hope doesn’t doubt that for a second. 

 

They climb down from Pegasus once they’re through the gate, watching as the woman strokes the horse’s mane gently, watching it with something like love in her eyes. 

“Follow me,” she tells them, nodding towards the large building looming ahead. “I’m Valkyrie. Don’t ask me any personal questions, steal my shit, or hurt my people, and we’ll get along just fine.”

“We don’t want to hurt anybody,” Hope assures her, walking in step with Cassie, Peter staying back to tend to Pegasus. 

“Great,” Valkyrie says, voice devoid of emotion. 

“I’m Hope. This is Cassie. We just...we just want to find her dad.” There’s still a sense of panic coiled in Hope’s gut, like she needs to run back to the town as quickly as she can, back through forest and fields and messed up road, dig through buildings and rubble and dead ends and alleyways until she finds Scott. Until the three of them can be complete again. 

“Yeah. We’ve all lost someone, so,” Valkyrie shrugs, reaching into her pocket and pulling out a hip flask, taking a deep swig. 

“Is that your real name? Valkyrie?” Hope asks out of interest, trying to take her mind off of this whole, awful, day. 

“Is that  _ your  _ real name? Hope?” Valkyrie challenges as they reach the double entrance doors. 

“I can confirm that Peter is  _ my  _ real name,” Peter calls, pulling the saddle off of Pegasus. 

“No one was doubting that, kid!” Valkyrie responds, and then she’s pulling a key from a chain around her neck, unlocking the door, and they’re stepping inside. 

It’s a long corridor, like a school or a hospital or a prison, windowless, other doors leading off of it, lit by a couple of camping lights placed at strategic points. Hope can’t help but feel that it looks imposing, threatening, like something from a horror movie. Like that’s not their whole life at this point. 

“How long have you been here?” She wonders aloud, following Valkyrie, guiding Cassie by the elbow. 

“Me? Just over six months. Carol and Thor have been here since the beginning. It’s them you want to thank.”

Just then, one of the doors opens, wrenched so violently that it slams back against the wall, a tall girl around Peter’s age appearing in the corridor, curly hair swinging behind her, panicked expression on her face. 

“Peter? Is Peter back?” She asks, so quickly the words all blur into one. 

“He’s out there, with Peg,” Valkyrie smiles, pointing out of the doors. The girl takes off running, no second of hesitation, shoving the double doors open and disappearing. “So, that’s MJ.”

“Is she Peter’s…?” Hope trails off, hoping Valkyrie will fill in the blank. 

“She’s Peter’s  _ something _ , that’s for sure,” she confirms. 

Valkyrie leads them into the room which MJ had vacated, almost hitting into an older woman with dark brown hair piled onto her head, circular glasses on at an angle. 

“Is he back?” She asks, worry so deep set on her face that Hope knows she has to be Peter’s guardian. 

“He’s back,” Valkyrie confirms in a voice softer than Hope knew she was capable of. The older woman follows in MJ’s footsteps, out along the corridor, headed towards the exit. 

Hope wonders how many of the other people in here are loved ones of Peter Parker, thanks God that she was able to save him. Earlier today he was just a scream in the distance, but had Hope pretended not to hear, convinced herself and Scott that helping him was the wrong thing to do, he’d surely be dead by now. Surely, these people, as human as any, would be left wondering where he’d gone, or else gone to search the town and found his torn apart remains. Worst of all, Hope thinks, is the possibility that he could have been bitten. That he could have showed up at the fence with the other zombies, a ghost of a shell of a person, left to haunt his loved ones in the cruelest way possible. 

This, she thinks, is what Scott agreed to lure the zombies away for. So that someone, Scott didn’t know who, had the possibility of coming home again. And just like that she wants to cry all over again, at the thought of the man she’s grown so close to risking his life without knowing who he’s doing it for, or knowing their chances of survival or condition or any of the facts beyond ‘a person's life is in danger and I have the chance to save it.’ 

“Hope,” Cassie’s squeezing her arm, and Hope snaps back to reality, blinking away the tears starting to form in her eyes. Now isn’t the time. Now’s the time for the solid exterior she’d spent months crafting so well, which had been melted down so quickly by Scott and Cassie. 

They’re standing in the entrance of a large, rectangular room, maybe a break or rec room in a past life, illuminated by string lights with battery packs, covered in blankets and cushions and a higgledy mishmash of couches and chairs. 

“Val? Who’s this?” A woman with messy blonde hair, falling to her shoulders asks, pushing herself up from the ground to approach them. 

“Peter bought them back,” Valkyrie says, rolling her eyes. “Apparently they saved his life. So,” she shrugs. The blonde woman stops in front of them, folding her arms, giving Hope the chance to look beyond her at the others in the room. 

There’s a very tall man with long blonde hair and an eyepatch, looking like he belongs in a movie or boxing ring or maybe another planet altogether. There’s a little boy in the corner, giggling at a dark haired woman, and- and…

“Gamora?” Hope can hardly believe what she’s saying, barely trusts her own judgement or voice. The woman freezes, one hand on the little boy’s shoulder, and she  _ definitely  _ didn’t have a child last time they were together. But, undoubtedly, it’s her. Same ratty blue baseball cap and all. 

“Hope?” Gamora’s voice is scratchy and exhausted, and last time Hope saw her they were screaming at each other in the pouring rain, months or lifetimes ago, whichever is long enough for Hope to feel like a completely different person now. 

“You’re not dead,” Hope comments, and then she's  _ really  _ fighting back tears, because the universe has given her this, has bought someone very important back to her. Hope spent most of her childhood at boarding school, had a mom who went missing for years, found it impossible to make friends who stuck. 

She found one, years later, at the end of the world, and they saved each other’s lives more times than Hope can count on her fingers. 

“Neither are you,” and there are tears in Gamora’s voice, too, and she’s pushing herself up off the ground, striding towards Hope as Hope steps forward too, meeting in the middle with a hug. 

“I’m sorry for being mad,” Hope says, though she can hardly remember what they fought about these days. Somehow, none of it matters any more. 

“I’m sorry for leaving,” Gamora replies, into Hope’s hair. 

“So,” the blonde woman says from behind them. Hope uses process of elimination to guess that she’s Carol. “You two know each other?” Hope and Gamora break apart, spinning to face her and Valkyrie. 

“Yeah. You could say that,” Gamora nods. “This is Hope. Hope, this is Carol. This is where I’ve been for the past couple months now.”

“You trust her?” Carol asks Gamora, face blank. 

“With everything,” Gamora confirms, and Hope has been so sure that Gamora would  _ hate  _ her if they found each other again. It’s a weight off her conscience, feeling it lighten ever so slightly. 

“Ok then,” Carol nods, extending a hand to Hope. “It’s good to meet you, Hope. I’m Carol.” Hope takes her hand, shakes it firmly. 

“Thank you. Thank you for letting us stay here.” Hope finds Cassie, back pressed against the doorframe, hands pulled into the cuffs of her sweaters, eyes wide. “This is Cassie,” Hope walks to her, puts her arm around her shoulders. “She’s my...my, uh...my friend’s daughter.”

“Hi,” Cassie says, voice barely above a whisper. 

“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Carol shakes Cassie’s hand too. 

“Cassie, huh?” Gamora quirks one eyebrow at the teenager. “Hope been taking care of you?”

“Yes. Yeah. She has,” Cassie nods, and Hope squeezes her shoulder. 

“Yeah,” Gamora smiles. “She’s good at that.”

“I am Groot!” The small boy in the corner exclaims, hopping to his feet and running to hug Gamora’s legs. 

“This,” Gamora laughs, “is Groot. I found him in a forest. I guess he’s my responsibility now.”

“Hi Groot,” Hope offers a hand for him to shake. He growls in response. 

“Excellent!” The tall blonde man claps his hands together. “I’m Thor. And now that we’ve all been introduced, I suggest we get down to business,” he pulls a giant tin of cookies from the shelf he’s standing beside, rattling them in Hope’s direction. 

 

The rest of the night passes like a blur, like a dream of life  _ before.  _ Hope and Cassie sit on one of the couches, squishing in with Gamora and Groot, across from the armchair Peter and MJ are sharing. Carol and Valkyrie take up space on the floor, legs tangled together, Peter’s Aunt May stretching out on a second armchair whilst Thor sits at an odd angle in a metal chair which Hope thinks might have been taken from a waiting area somewhere. MJ produces a battery powered CD player, batteries replaced by some tipped from Peter’s backpack, a new CD produced from the front pocket of the bag, making MJ beam. There’s a heavy book for her too, a slightly crumpled pack of chocolates for his aunt, which he claims are ‘only slightly past it’. There are cookies and soda and a game of monopoly, and if there wasn’t a giant hole in the room where Scott should be standing then it would almost feel like some place Hope could call home. 

Instead, she finds it hard to sit still, an ache in her stomach and chest, fighting her every instinct screaming at her to look for Scott. 

Carol gives Hope the key to a room with two bunk beds squished against the walls, and around ten-fifteen she and Cassie traipse in, fall into the lower bunks across from each other in exhaustion. 

“Hey,” Hope whispers through the darkness, turning on her side. If she stretched her hand out all the way, she could reach Cassie’s bed, can see her staring at the bottom of the top bunk with her eyes wide open. “We’ll get your dad back, Cass. I promise.”

Silence. 

“I’m...I’m really sorry for letting him go. It should have been me.” Hope can’t help it. She needs to say this. “I-”

“No,” Cassie mumbles. “Dad wouldn’t have let it be anyone else. That’s...that’s just who he is.”

_ That’s just who he is.  _ He’s only been in her life for a matter of weeks, but Hope knows that sentiment is true, feels it in her bones. He’s got a heart of gold like no one she’s ever known before. 

“The world needs more of that,” Hope says, reaching across the empty space between them. Cassie reaches too, fingers finding each other somewhere in the middle. 

Hope knows that having attachments in the apocalypse is a dumb idea. She knows it’s  _ especially  _ dumb to have attachments to a kid, even if said kid  _ can  _ throw knives like nobody’s business. Kids can be careless and clunky and make poor decisions which, in situations like this, cost lives, tear apart families. Family has always been a somewhat abstract concept to Hope, always been a sentiment she’s had complicated feelings about. But lately, late at night, she’s been entertaining the idea that the three of them could be something like that, someday. Not yet, but  _ someday _ . Families come in a hundred different shapes and sizes, Hope knows, but the main thing is love and respect and belonging. And the outlines of those emotions are there already, waiting to be coloured in with big life milestones and the little moments in between. With time, they could be something vaguely family shaped, Hope thinks. So she guesses she’s stuck with Cassie now, and when they get him back, she’ll be stuck with Scott too. And she wouldn’t want it any other way. 

 

Hope barely sleeps. The hour or two she does get is broken up with nightmares or the sick feeling settling at the back of her throat. She gets up at the first hint of light pushing at the boarded up windows, about ready to steal Pegasus and head back to the town, taking Valkyrie’s sword on her way out. Unfortunately, her body has other ideas, and the bone deep exhaustion and screaming in her stomach force her to head to the basic kitchen first, the pale beige room Valkyrie had pointed out last night. 

There, Hope finds Carol, sitting at the countertop in workout clothes, stirring a bowl of oatmeal and frowning intently at a large book open to a page with an illustration of wheat. 

“Oh. Hi,” Hope greets her, surprised at finding anyone else up so early. It’s barely five. 

“G’morning!” Carol looks up, smiles a little. 

“You guys have oatmeal?” Hope hates that that’s what she’s leading with when there’s a much more pressing issue at hand, but she’s been surviving on stale protein bars for the past few days. Some of them were damp from rain pooling at the top of her backpack. 

“Yeah, you want some?” Carol offers. 

“Yeah. Yes, I’d love some. Thank you.”

Carol points her in the right direction. It’s instant stuff, and has to be made with water over a gas camping stove, but it’s hot and filling and sweet, and exactly what Hope needs on a morning like this. 

“What are you reading?” Hope asks, halfway through her bowl. Carol’s frowning even more intently at the wheat now, as if she’s got a personal vendetta against the crop. 

“It’s a thing about homesteading,” Carol explains. “We already grow some basic vegetables, but we’re going to need to go larger if we want to survive long term. But to do that I need some kind of machinery, a sprinkler system...stuff I just don’t know how to do,” she groans. 

Hope thinks back to Scott and Cassie’s cabin, to the rainwater collection system on the roof, the way the water was filtered and clean enough to drink. She thinks about the cabin lighting and the clever placement of trip wires around the perimeter. She doesn’t know much about who Scott was before the outbreak, but she knows he was somebody with some degree of technical expertise. Somebody who might have something to say about farming systems, anyway. 

“I know a guy,” Hope offers up. “But I’ll need to borrow that horse to get him back.”

Carol pauses, index finger halfway down the page, brow furrowed. “This your guy who saved Peter?”

Hope swallows. “Yeah. Cassie’s dad. He’s...he’s smart. Useful,” she’s trying to sell him to Carol, because the truth is, she knows none of the residents of the base stand to gain from letting Hope borrow the horse to go and get Scott back. There’s no guarantee, to them, that she’ll come back, even if she leaves Cassie here. But if Hope can offer something in return…

“You think he’s still alive?” Carol asks, words blunt and bitter, head tilted to one side to watch Hope carefully. Hope gets the distinct impression that Carol is looking  _ through _ , rather than  _ at  _ her. 

“Yeah,” she answers, after a beat. And she believes it, really. Partly because Scott truly is a smart guy, and Hope has no doubt he’s found someplace safe. Partly because picturing a world without Scott is just too much. It’s colder and crueler and less worth staying alive for. 

“So you want to go find him?” Carol asks. 

“Yeah. I’ll walk back if I have to,” Hope shrugs, stirring her oatmeal. 

Carol continues to survey her, eyes running over her unwashed hair, dirt-flecked skin, the borrowed grey t-shirt produced by May last night. 

“Give me an hour,” is all she says, pushing her stool away from the countertop. “I’ll meet you by the front door.”

 

One hour. That’s all Hope has to wait before going back. Her feet itch, blood pumping so it’s impossible to sit still, but she’s made it this far, can make it  _ one more hour.  _ She isn’t entirely sure what Carol means by that - whether it’s one hour until she’ll open up the doors and send her on her way, one hour until she’ll help Hope tack up Pegasus for the trip, one hour until she’ll make the trip into the town with her… Hope doesn’t know, but the last one seems too good to be true, so she presumes that it is. 

Hope finishes her oatmeal, pours herself a cup of water from the giant bottle on the countertop, cleans her dish, runs her fingers through her hair and pulls it up into a ponytail, flicks through Carol’s homesteading book, and then takes to the rec room area to fold blankets and organise chairs. 

Once the clock on the wall tells Hope she’s only got twenty minutes left, she takes a deep breath and walks back to the room she spent the night in, knowing there’s something she needs to do before she can go. 

“Cassie?” Hope whispers, sitting gently on the edge of her bed, shaking her shoulders carefully. 

Cassie’s eyes are scrunched shut, body curled into a ball, like she’s trying to protect herself from harm even in sleep. It hurts Hope’s heart, and she doesn’t know what Cassie was like before the outbreak, the kind of things she liked to do, but she knows that Cassie deserves more than this. Deserves to beat this world. Deserves to have her dad back and a cure for this. Hope promises, silently, that she won’t stop until she’s got both for her. 

“Cassie?” Hope tries again, shaking a little harder until Cassie’s eyes start to blink open slowly. 

“Hope?” Cassie seems confused, bringing a hand up to rub the sleep from her eyes. “Did something happen? Do we need to leave?” Her voice is slow and sleep-thick, and Hope  _ hates  _ that those are Cassie’s first thoughts, that they’re in danger again. Hates that they have to live in a world where nowhere is really, truly safe. 

“No. No, it’s ok. You can go back to sleep in a minute, you’re safe,” Hope smooths back Cassie’s hair. “I just wanted to say bye.”

“Bye? What?” Cassie’s eyes flicker wide open. 

“I’m going to go get your dad back. And then we’ll come back here, ok?” Hope wishes she sounded more confident about that. Wishes she knew for certain that both her and Scott would come back. But the truth of it is that if she’s given the choice between saving herself and Scott, she’s picking him. For Cassie. 

“I can come. I want to come,” Cassie struggles to sit up, Hope pushing her back down. 

“No. You stay here, you sleep,” Hope tells her. “We’ll come back.”

“You promise?”

Hope hesitates. “I promise I’ll try my hardest. Is that ok?”

“Yeah. Yeah.”

Hope pulls Cassie in for a hug, holding her tightly and feeling Cassie doing the same. 

“Cassie. If I don’t...if I don’t m-”

“No. Don’t say it. Don’t say goodbye like that,” Cassie says, pulling out of the hug, a determined look on her face. “You’re coming back. And you can tell me whatever it is then.”

Hope nods, once, committing Cassie to memory. “I’ll see you soon then,” she says, standing up, taking a steadying breath. 

Hope pulls her knives from her backpack, picks her jacket up from the end of the bed, and turns to leave the room, returning Cassie’s sad smile as she goes. She vows that this will not be the last memory she has of Cassie. She’s coming back. 

 

Hope waits by the door for the last part of the hour, Valkyrie and Carol showing up right on time, in dark clothing, swords slung on their backs. 

“Here,” Carol holds out a thick leather jacket as she gets closer. 

“Why do I need this?” Hope asks, accepting it anyway. 

“Zombie teeth are no tougher than ours. Have you ever tried biting through leather?” Valkyrie supplies, and it makes perfect sense. 

 

The three of them leave on Pegasus, Thor seeing them off the premises and taking up his patrol position by the gate, watching them carefully as they ride pass a couple of slow zombies meandering around the path. Hope tenses as they pass them, checking their faces, making sure they’re not...it’s too much to think about. But she’s safe, checks all four of them, feels a little lighter until she remembers that they were somebody’s loved ones too, once. One of the women wears a ring on her finger, Hope glimpses it as they pass, always finds it strangely jarring to see remnants of a life within the monsters. 

They make it to the town quickly enough, Hope finally feeling calm again now she’s actually  _ doing  _ something, a steady determination settling itself over her body, senses sharpening. She’s going to find Scott, and they’re going to go back to the base and stay until they feel ok again, and  _ then  _ they're going to go and find Bruce Banner and fix the world. And it all starts right now, dismounting Pegasus at the wall, clambering over, and leading Carol and Valkyrie to the alley where it all went wrong. 

“So this is where you last saw him?” Carol clarifies, looking around the alley. 

“He went that way, drawing the horde away,” Hope supplies, pointing down the road Scott took. 

“Ok. Ok, let’s figure this out,” Carol walks to the edge of the alley, looks down the road both ways. 

“She knows what she’s doing,” Valkyrie tells Hope. “She was in the Air Force, before all this. She’s used to living in a war zone.” And Hope supposes that’s what the whole planet is now, as far as she knows. A war zone. But there’s nobody waiting back home to meet you when you’re done. No being done at all. 

Carol hands them each a radio, shows them how to use them, talks them through their strategy, explaining that they should each fan out down a parallel street and look for places a human being might run through, or hide - open buildings, broken windows, dumpsters, cars, anything like that. Hope’s growing a little uneasy now, had half expected Scott to be waiting in the alley by her message on the wall telling him she’d be back. 

“Don’t get sloppy,” Carol warns. “If your friend is here, we’ll find him, we aren’t in a hurry. Just be careful.” The three of them look at each other for a second, and Hope is filled with gratitude. 

Before she met Scott and Cassie, she was certain that the apocalypse made everyone harsher, crueler versions of themselves. Now, she's seeing that that isn’t true for everyone. In fact, it’s true only for a minority, she thinks. For most people, it just made them kinder, more determined, set on holding onto their humanity. Sure, they’re rougher around the edges, but actually they’re just trying to stay alive, and to carry as many others with them as they can. 

 

Hope leaves the alley at the same time as Carol and Valkyrie, stepping carefully along the street Scott had disappeared along less than twenty-four hours earlier. It feels like it’s all been a dream, some kind of haze since then, something that Hope doesn’t know for sure if she’ll ever be able to wake up from. 

There are three zombies creeping at the end of an alley, midway up the street, snapping at each other, and it’s the first logical escape route Hope can see along the road, having encountered only closed stores so far, shutters pulled down. Not the sort of place a person in a rush, running for their life, would stop to try and get into. But the  _ alley _ might be, especially as there’s a large dumpster at the end. It’s just that to get there, Hope’s going to need to take out the zombies. 

Once upon a time she’d have done it without blinking. Done it without a  _ need  _ to, maybe. But now, it’s the last thing she wants. Like all of the violence and death and gore has finally caught up to her, and her brain is screaming  _ enough.  _

But even worse than killing these creature, the virus that’s overtaken their bodies, worse than the thought of any more spilled blood, is the thought of never getting Scott home. So Hope pulls out her knives and makes quick work of them. 

The alley is dark and dingy, more closed off than the other alleyway, the stench of death, far too familiar to Hope now, hanging in the air. 

“Scott?” She hisses, knowing as she speaks that it’s useless, adrenaline pumping in her veins as she approaches the dumpster. 

Hope checks underneath first, falling to her knees in the grime, but there’s nothing there aside from trash. Next, with shaking hands, Hope reaches out to lift the lid of the dumpster. She’s terrified, half convinced that he’s going to be in there, bitten, reaching to tear her apart. Maybe, she thinks, she’ll let him. 

There’s a black garbage bag, split open at the sides, and a group of rats attacking it hungrily, scattering when the light from the lid being opened hits them. There’s nothing else. Mostly, she’s relieved not to find him dead. The other part of her is heartbroken he’s not in there, alive and waiting. 

 

The heartbreak continues as she walks the street, wriggling in through holes in windows, trying locked doors, scaling a wall at the end of the street, rifling through the remains of stores, relics of life before the outbreak. Hope finds a sad looking teddy bear, mismatching pairs of shoes, three smashed cell phones, a half-charred family photo, a severed arm (she checks, it's definitely not Scott’s), countless rats, and seven zombies. She kills them all, knives to the skull, can’t risk keeping any of them alive. Anyway, she figures if she kills as many as she can, she’s helping fix the world. There’s only so many zombies in it, only so many it can be possible to kill before they’re all gone. She could try to do the math, if she really wanted to, but she doesn’t know the ratio of humans to zombies, knows that figure changes daily anyway. She can only hope it changes in humanity’s favour. 

 

Hope clears her street, moves onto the next one, and the next, and the next. The sun moves across the sky. There’s a large rook following her down the streets, hoping she’ll drop food. She doesn’t have anything to give. 

 

She clears her whole area, wants to scream at the sky, run around this entire town until he’s found, dead or alive. She can’t stand this, the agony of not knowing. Can’t possibly go back to the base and tell Cassie her dad is still missing. 

“Hope, what’s your status?” Valkyrie’s voice crackles over the walkie. 

Hope hesitates, wonders whether it’s worth dropping the walkie and leaving, camping out in this crap town until she finds Scott. She shakes the thought away as quickly as it enters her mind. Carol and Valkyrie know what they’re doing here, for some unclear reason, they want to help. And she can’t do that to Cassie, anyway. 

“Section cleared,” Hope confirms, sadly. 

“Let’s meet back at the alley,” Valkyrie says, and Hope sighs, standing in the sunshine on shards of broken glass in a quiet street in the quiet, broken world. 

 

“You find anything?” Hope asks, as Valkyrie comes back into view minutes later, kicking an empty can around the alley with the toe of her boots. 

“No. Sorry, Hope,” Valkyrie says sadly, twirling her walkie in her fingers. 

“It’s ok,” she’d expected nothing else. “Thank you. Thank you so much for helping.”

“Hey,” Valkyrie reaches out, patting Hope’s arm. “We aren’t giving up yet.”

Hope thanks her wordlessly with the warmest smile she can muster, doesn’t think there really are words for this, and then takes to pacing the alley again, knowing the ground beneath her feet by heart. 

“Is Carol done?” She asks. 

“Uh,” Valkyrie bites her lip. “I can’t reach her,” she shakes her walkie in the air, voice level with a hint of worry underneath it. Hope knows that voice. She’s trying to convince Hope, and by extension herself, that everything is fine. But really, she wants to panic. 

“Since when?” Hope asks, turning back to face Valkyrie. 

“I don’t know,” Valkyrie shrugs, “maybe thirty minutes. But it’s-it’s fine. The radios are old. Carol’s fine, she’s-she’ll be back any second. It’s ok. It’s ok,” she nods. Hope watches her, recognises the deep worry on Valkyrie’s face. It’s the same, Hope thinks, as the type which must be on her own face. Valkyrie cares about Carol, maybe more than she cares about anyone else still living. 

“You’re right,” Hope nods, “I’m sure she’s ok.”

It’s Valkyrie’s turn for a smile of appreciation this time, worn and scared, but still there.

They have an understanding, the same fear in their blood, the same fierce protectiveness in their hearts. They’re what’s left of the world after the fire burned out. They’ve risen from the ashes. They’re going to carry on. 

 

They wait. Valkyrie has a gold watch on her wrist, checks it every few minutes, kicking the garbage at her feet with more intensity each time. They’re not being particularly quiet, almost daring the undead to hear them, daring them to try. 

After ten minutes, there’s a sound in the street Valkyrie had been searching, to the left of the alley. Hope and Valkyrie’s eyes snap to each other, freezing, fingers itching on the hilts of their knives. It’s laboured breathing, not the groans of zombies who don’t need breath to keep them going. All at once, the silence is broken, and Valkyrie and Hope rush to the end of the alley, stepping out into the light. 

Two figures, ambling towards them, one limping heavily, half dragged along the street by the other. It’s Carol, fresh blood on her cheek, hair wild, jeans torn. The other person, being helped through every step by Carol, face too pale, the owner of the laboured breathing, is Scott. 

Hope claps her hands to her mouth at the opening of the alley, stops breathing, thanks the universe and every deity she can name for keeping Scott alive. She catalogues the damage, keeps a list in her mind as he and Carol get closer, looks at the blood on his jeans, the bruise on his temple, his free hand pressed against his ribs. But then he’s looking up and seeing her, and his expression turns from pained to peaceful, and Hope can’t stand still any longer, gets over the shock, takes off towards him at a run, as fast as her legs can possibly move, until she’s in front of him, throwing her arms around his neck, eyes so full of tears she can’t see anymore. 

Carol steps away, Hope taking Scott’s weight as he wraps his arms around her waist, pulls her in, buries his face in her hair. 

“You’re ok,” she whispers, but it’s more like a sob, and he’s holding her so tight she can’t breathe. 

“So are you,” he says back, and nothing else in the whole world matters. The zombie apocalypse took their homes and families and lives away, but it’s giving them this moment in the shattered remains of a town which tourists used to visit to climb into a giant potato. 

Scott loosens his grip minutes later, and Hope pulls back, hands on his face, thumb gently brushing the yellowing shadow of the newly formed bruise. His hands stay on her waist, and if she wanted to, she could kiss him right now. Their faces are inches apart, tears on both of their cheeks, neither one having ever been so grateful to be  _ alive.  _ But Scott’s hurt, and Carol and Valkyrie are standing beside them, and they need to get back to the base and find Cassie. It’s not the right time. But still, Hope surprises herself by how much she  _ wants  _ this. She doesn’t think she’s ever wanted to kiss a person so much before. 

“Hi,” Scott says instead, smiling at her like everything around them is invisible. 

“Hi,” Hope echoes, and she’s smiling back at him, as the past day ceases to matter. 

 

There’s too many of them to fit on Pegasus on the way back to the base, so Scott and Carol, pretending she isn’t hurt but eventually giving in, take a spot on the horse whilst Hope and Valkyrie walk beside them. Scott reaches for Hope’s hand as soon as he’s up, and they twine their fingers together for most of the long walk back, whilst they trade stories. Scott tells them about what happened. He explains how the zombies gained on him faster than expected, so he just kept running, determined to lead them as far away from Hope as possible. He’d hidden in a storefront, waiting for the zombies to pass him, before falling through a weak floorboard and landing in a basement, his bad leg hurt even worse, knocked out until it was almost dark. And then his leg had hurt so bad it had been impossible to climb back out. 

Hope tells him about Peter taking them back to the Air Force base, tells Scott all about it with the help of Carol and Valkyrie. It feels, finally, like they really might be able to beat this world, make it out of the other side of humanity’s blackest months. 

 

Thor’s waiting for them when they get back to the base, sitting on the ground on the other side of the gate, a tattered book propped up on his knees. He’s thrilled to see them, lets them in, shakes Scott’s hand firmly and pats him on the back so hard he almost falls off of Pegasus, kept stable by Hope’s hand. 

And then Scott and Carol are climbing down from the horse, Valkyrie linking arms with Carol for the short walk back to the base, Hope’s arms around Scott to help him limp back. The double doors at the entrance open with a click, three figures appearing in the doorway, the tall outline of MJ, a book permanently under one arm, Peter’s toothy grin. And Cassie, who immediately bursts into sobs as she catches sight of Scott. 

Cassie’s hug catches both Scott and Hope, arms encircling them and holding them close to her, both of them squeezing Cassie tightly too, standing on the battered pathway as the sun starts to get low. 

“You came back.  _ You came back _ ,” Cassie sobs, somewhere in between Hope and Scott’s shoulders, pressed together. 

“Of course I came back, Peanut,” Scott says, kissing the top of Cassie’s head. “I’ll always come back.”

 

Hope and May clean and bandage Scott’s leg, May helping without hesitation, no one having to ask or prompt her, furthering Hope’s theory that the apocalypse is, mostly, bringing out the good in people. Cassie holds his hand the entire time, wipes the dirt off his face with a cotton swab, hands him water and protein bars, and Peter brings in a chicken broth he and MJ had heated over the stove. 

Once Scott’s leg is cleaned up, sore ribs bound in bandage, Valkyrie hands them containers of water and bars of soap, clean mismatched clothes gathered from various people and places, and Scott and Hope emerge from bathroom stalls twenty minutes later like new people. 

 

“So, this is the guy?” Gamora pounces on Hope as soon as she enters the rec room. It’s almost dark by now, and she’s been at the base a whole twenty-four hours. 

It’s incredible, she thinks, the difference in the way she felt yesterday and the way she feels today. Last night, she was in pain and anxious, unable to sit still or think about anything beyond finding Scott, feel anything but guilt and anger. Tonight, she’s settled on one of the couches, leaning against his good side, Cassie’s feet in her lap. 

“I am indeed  _ the guy _ ,” Scott says, raising his eyebrows suggestively at Hope. 

“Not like  _ that _ ,” she rolls her eyes, slaps his arm lightly. He catches her hand, twining their fingers together again. 

“You’re the guy she’s been travelling with,” Gamora explains, settling into the plastic chair across from them. Groot is on the ground in front of her, smashing two Lego figures together. 

“Oh, yeah. That would be me.”

“Hmm,” Gamora muses, looking between Scott and Hope. 

“What?” Scott asks. 

“Nothing.”

“ _ What _ ?” It’s Hope’s turn this time. 

“Nothing!” Gamora laughs, busying herself stopping Groot from breaking the Legos.

 

All three of them sleep in the room Hope and Cassie had taken the night before, Cassie moving to a top bunk, Hope and Scott laying across from each other at the bottom. It makes most sense, although Gamora mentions she has space in her room, but if Hope’s honest she’s not sure she could sleep anywhere out of sight of Cassie and Scott. She needs to know they’re safe. Maybe that’s a weakness, so shoot her, it’s one she’s happy to have. 

Hope feels safest when she’s touching Scott. Hands twined together in space between them, knees brushing when they sit beside each other, his legs thrown over hers when they relax. On the first night, it’s hands, clasped on the couch and finding each other wordlessly as they lay across from each other in the bedroom, solid and careful and together. Hope sleeps more than she’s slept in a long time, waking up just once in the night around the one a.m mark, carefully peeling her hand from Scott’s and heading to the kitchen for a drink. She finds Valkyrie and Carol, Carol sitting on the countertop whilst Valkyrie stands in front of her, patching up the cut on her forehead. And Hope wouldn’t have believed it unless she’d seen it, but the seemingly fearless Carol is  _ giggling  _ at Valkyrie. Hope stands in the doorway for a second, watches Carol pepper Valkyrie’s face with kisses, feels a strange kind of calm wash over her. 

Sometimes, Hope wishes she had a camera, wishes she could collect every beautiful moment of the apocalypse, stick them into a leather bound album and hand it down through generations. Show it to somebody’s great grandchildren, learning about the years the earth fell, and promise them it wasn’t always dark. Show them the strength in kind acts and soft kisses and what it means to be a human being. 

Hope turns and goes back to bed, picks up Scott’s hand again and falls back to sleep quicker than she has since she was small. 

 

It takes five days before Scott really feels like his leg is getting back to normal, and during that time he realises that is definitely in love with Hope. He thinks things must move faster at the end of the world, people have no time to fight back their feelings or overthink every interaction. Instead, there’s just certainty, a knowledge that the feeling he gets in his chest when she laughs, the way he can’t help but smile when she walks into the room, how she can make Cassie laugh almost as hard as he can, all add up to love. But just because he  _ knows  _ that now, it doesn’t mean it’s going to be any easier to tell Hope. He isn’t even sure if he should tell her, if he’s being honest. He doesn’t want to burden her, make her feel obligated to say she feels the same way if she doesn’t, and doesn’t want to make things feel awkward if she doesn’t want this. He’s scared of what this means, what acting on it might mean, what it might change. 

It feels strangely nice to be scared about something so ordinary. 

Scott spends a lot of his time helping Carol figure out ways to farm the land on the base to a larger scale, sitting at the kitchen counter with Carol’s books and wide sheets of paper, sketching and erasing and calculating. Hope helps with the design elements, May plans what they can plant to make sure they’ll have food year-round. Gamora and Valkyrie and Thor, and sometimes Hope, walk the area around the base, come back with buckets of fish or strawberries or, once, a fresh elk. 

Best of all, Scott watches Cassie interacting with kids her own age again, reading with MJ or playing one of the increasingly complicated games Peter invents. It’s easy to forget there are zombies just outside the gates, lying in wait, the virus continuing to spread, the world continuing to crumble. Scott can tell Hope is antsy to continue on her journey, to find Banner, but she doesn’t mention it, telling him they can wait until Scott’s better before they leave again. It’s reassuring that she’s not planning to leave by herself, like she would have weeks ago, probably in the night without saying goodbye. Scott doesn’t know what he’d do if she disappeared like that, and he tells her as much, asks her to wait for him. 

“I’ll come with you. I want to, I- I just need a little more time.” He’s no use to anyone out there like this, and he knows it, hates it with a passion. 

“I know. It’s ok, Scott. I think we could all use some rest,” Hope says, chopping an extremely skinny carrot for Scott to add to the meal they volunteered to make. 

“Yeah. Yeah, this is a good thing. Right?”

“Right. We’ll go when you’re ok again,” Hope says, like they’re unquestionably a team now. 

 

The reality of their situation comes crashing back down every few days, making everyone uneasy. There’s the gap in the fence, the lone zombie wandering up to the base early in the morning. It’s fixed by Thor, who then double checks the fence the whole way round with Valkyrie. 

There’s the two days of Groot throwing up, nobody having a medical degree and not knowing what to do, Gamora filled with white hot fear that he’ll die, until suddenly he starts to get better again and they guess he ate something he shouldn’t have. 

The scariest is MJ and Peter walking to the neighbouring houses without telling anyone, looking for interesting finds, and Peter rushing in in the middle of dinner, a terrified looking MJ on his back. 

“Peter?” It’s May who stands up first, knowing that something is terribly wrong. 

“It’s her leg. It’s- it’s, May I’m so sorry. We left, we needed to go outside, we- I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. She… MJ…” Peter, Who Scott knows by now usually has trouble being quiet, can’t find the words. 

“Peter? What’s going on?” Carol approaches as MJ jumps to the floor, standing on one leg and holding Peter’s shoulder for balance. She wordlessly pulls up the left cuff of her jeans, showing a deep, crescent moon shaped wound on her ankle. 

She doesn’t have to say anything. None of them do. They’ve lived in this world long enough to know what that means. 

“MJ? What happened?” May asks, voice several pitches higher than it usually is. 

“I fell, in someone’s basement, on the stairwell. I- I…”

“There were two of them. They grabbed her,” Peter’s eyes are shining with tears. “But there was loads of sharp crap blocking the stairs. We don’t- we don’t know if… if it’s…” there are tears falling now, and he pushes them away angrily with the heel of his palm. 

MJ takes a deep breath. “We don’t know if I got bit or not.”

It’s Hope and May who spring into action, pulling MJ into one of the side offices. Scott follows, scared for all of them, one arm around a horrified looking Cassie. 

“Will she be ok, dad?” Cassie asks, like she’s five again and Scott has the answers to every question she could possibly come up with, or else can make up something convincing enough. 

“I… I don’t know, Peanut,” Scott admits, watching as Hope cleans the wound, MJ looking at Peter instead of her ankle. 

Hope and May, after conferring with Carol, are pretty sure it’s a blade wound on MJ’s ankle, not a bite or scratch, but MJ locks herself in a bedroom for the entire twenty-four hours it would take for the infection to take hold. Once the time’s up, after hours of everyone’s silence and anger and high tensions, Peter taking up residence on the other side of the door, MJ lets herself out with a shaky confidence. She feels fine, and the cut on her ankle looks like any other normal cut. It's ok. Life carries on. Everyone is a little more afraid of basements than they were before. 

 

More days pass. They can’t go outside for long without attracting zombies, so they play a giant game of tag in the base. Scott, Cassie, Thor and Groot spend a whole afternoon building a giant fort in the living room out of random pieces of furniture. Valkyrie and Carol go on a supply run and come back with a case of CDs and a new pack of batteries, swiped from someone’s car. Scott’s days are filled up by Hope. Their arms touch at breakfast and it’s like there’s an electricity between them, they clean dishes together and talk about random crap like their favourite 90s sitcom or how serious the relationship is between Carol and Valkyrie. Scott can spend all day in Hope’s presence and still feel sad when it’s time to go to sleep because it means he’ll be missing hours and hours they could be together in. 

He decides it’s time to do something about it. 

 

There’s a rain storm, so heavy that the sound echoes off the roof and fills the rooms with a pattering so loud that Scott’s surprised it isn’t hailing. They play UNO by candlelight and Carol worries about her seeds outside, Scott’s leg is so much better that it barely even hurts anymore. He, Hope and Cassie have been sleeping better than they have in a long time. It’s amazing, Scott thinks, what high gates and locked doors can do for a person, how much better you sleep when you know that you, and the people who are most important to you in the world, are  _ safe.  _

But on this night, almost two weeks after arriving, Scott isn’t tired, lays staring at the slate of the bed above him whilst the minute hand on his watch ticks away, creating a melody with the raindrops on the roof. He can hear Cassie’s soft, steady breaths, and Hope is curled up in the bed across from him, hair covering her face. 

The rain gets heavier, and Scott’s not one for staying still, feeling more and more antsy with every passing minute. So, he pushes the covers away and pads slowly into the rec room. 

The CD player stands in the corner, the ever-increasing stack of CDs next to it, and Scott’s about sick of listening to rain, so he flicks through the pile, chooses something slightly scratched, labelled ‘mix seven’, and opens the heavy curtains a crack to let the moonlight flood in. It’s peaceful out there at this time of night, no zombies in his eyeline. The world still and quiet. Easy to forget about the outbreak. 

“What’cha looking at?” A voice behind Scott makes him jump for a split second before he recognises it as Hope’s, a little sleep riddled, but soft and familiar and comforting. 

It’s amazing how quickly the sound of her voice has become his favourite thing. 

She’s standing in the doorway, wearing a dark blue military issue t-shirt and shorts which make her legs look impossibly long. 

“My own reflection, in the window,” Scott jokes. “I was thinking I need to get back into shape.”

“Oh, yeah,” Hope agrees, “I can see that.”

“Hey, give me a break, I almost got eaten by zombies.”

Hope laughs softly, moves to stand next to him in the window. “So did MJ. You don’t see her complaining.” She takes his hand. 

“Well, she's a tough kid. There’s a reason Cassie likes her,” Scott shrugs. The song changes to something fast but sweet, like it should be playing at a prom or the end of a rom-com. 

“Hey, Scott?” Hope asks, something like excitement in her voice. “Do you want to do something dumb?”

“Hope. I thought you’d never ask.” He turns to look at her, and she’s smiling a softer smile than he’s ever seen her smile before, head tilted back a little. 

Hope steps back from the window, holds out her free hand for Scott to take. He does, holding it like they’re at a middle school dance, and to the 90s song Scott can’t quite place and the screaming rain overhead, they start to dance around the rec room. 

“You were right. This is dumb,” Scott says, but he’s smiling so much it hurts. Half at Hope and how much fun she’s having, despite not being able to dance in the slightest, and half at the bizarreness of the situation. Scott never thought he’d find himself dancing around the rec room of an Air Force base at midnight during a rainstorm in the apocalypse with the woman he’s sort of, maybe, in love with. 

“I warned you,” Hope laughs, raising her arm to let Scott twirl beneath it. 

Scott pulls her closer as the song slows a little, elbows pressed together, her breath tickling his face. 

The CD skips seconds later, crackling and then changing to something so much slower and so cliche that Scott has to laugh out loud. 

“Oh my God,” Hope joins in. 

“This is terrible. Who mixed this CD?” 

But then Scott looks up from his feet at the same time Hope looks up from her own, and he swears they’re closer than they were a second ago. And the music might be stupid but if this is the end of a rom com, then Scott should really say the lines. They both still at the same time, Scott letting go of Hope’s hands and moving to her hips, her hands stretching out behind his neck. It’s like the day Carol rescued him from the basement all over again, but this time,  _ this time _ they’re not in the middle of a ruined street, exposed to the elements, being watched, or gravely injured. 

This time they’re just two people standing in a low-lit room in the rain by themselves, cliche music in the background. 

The CD skips again, fizzing out into a low white noise, blending in with the rain sound. There are zombies slowly gathering at the gate outside. Neither of them notice. Neither of them would care right now, if they did. Instead, Scott reaches down a little, eyes shut, breath frozen in his lungs, and presses his lips to Hope’s. And just for a minute, the universe stands still.    
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So as you can see this is now planned to be 3 chapters instead of 2, owing to the fact that fic kind of has a mind of its own. 
> 
> Huge thank you to @Dorasolo for all of the encouragement!!
> 
> Come scream at me on tumblr @jakelovesamy or twitter @soupwitches. Thank you so much for reading! Comments and kudos are love :)


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to @Dorasolo for the betaing and encouragement!
> 
> A heads up that there’s some mentions of death/suicide at the end of this chapter!

Scott and Hope don’t talk about the kiss, the midnight dancing, or the way both of their hearts feel lighter when they’re together. Rather, they fall into something like a relationship, completely by accident. The kisses continue, bleeding into the next day and the next day and the next. They start with a good morning kiss and stretch into good night kisses and then there are, quite suddenly, kisses for no particular reason at all. They run out of excuses but, by this point, they don’t need them anymore. 

They hold hands walking down the hallway, offer to go on supply runs together, working seamlessly as a team. 

No one mentions the change in their relationship. It’s the zombie apocalypse, things happen. Generally much quicker and more intensely than they would have, before. 

The exception to this is Cassie, who is sitting on her bunk smirking at Scott as he enters the room, a week or so after the best thing to happen to him in a long while. He’s humming, folding up the newly washed t-shirts, doesn’t notice Cassie, the large hardback book borrowed from MJ propped open on her knees. 

“So,” she claps her hands together, making Scott jump and shriek a little, though he tries to disguise it as a cough. “Smooth,” Cassie winks. 

“It’s the zombie apocalypse, Peanut. You can’t scare me like that!”

“You’ll get over it,” Cassie says, fiddling with the edges of the pages of the book. “Anyway. You and Hope. You’re a thing now, huh?”

Scott drops the black t-shirt he’s holding. It’s not that he’s been afraid of Cassie, or anyone really, finding out about him and Hope. It’s not that he’s given anyone finding out much thought at all, really, because they haven’t been hiding it. Whatever  _ it  _ is. Scott isn’t sure, and he doesn’t know whether or not to bring it up with Hope, whether or not it’s something they need to  _ talk  _ about. Maybe this is just what they are now, two people who follow the pattern of a relationship without ever defining it. Maybe it’s defined enough already. Scott doesn’t know. And he isn’t going to worry about it right now. There are bigger things at stake. Like the fact that Cassie might not be ok with this. 

“I… I guess so?” Scott shrugs, picks the t-shirt back up. 

“You  _ guess so _ ?”

“Yeah. I mean...we haven’t talked about it,” he admits, wondering when Cassie got old enough to have this sort of conversation with. Wondering how much the end of the world has aged her. If she’ll ever really get to be a teenage girl again. 

“Maybe you should?” Cassie suggests, like it's simple. Like they’ll be talking about the weather, or what to collect on the next supply run (both are casual topics of conversation, these days). 

“It’s not that easy,” Scott sighs, sitting down on the edge of Hope’s bed. 

“Really, dad? It’s the apocalypse. It’s easy compared to some of the crap we’ve been through,” Cassie points out. 

“You’d think so,” Scott responds. “Are you ok with this, anyway? Me and Hope?” Scott sits up straighter, looks Cassie straight in the eyes. 

She smiles back, “Yeah, dad. I just want you to be happy.”

Scott swallows. “Are  _ you  _ happy?” 

Happiness seems abstract, these days. Not entirely unattainable, but short lived, defined differently to how it was defined before. Discovered in unusually good meals or a CD without scratches on it or a hard-earned win at a game of monopoly. It’s found in the people they love and in days where they don’t see a single zombie passing the base. Sometimes happiness lasts for hours, but other times they’re on top of the world one second, and dragged down the next. Life’s a war zone now. Happiness is much harder to pin down. 

“Sure,” Cassie answers, seconds too late. She bites her lip, goes back to the book in her lap. Scott’s heart hurts. 

 

“Hey,” he finds Hope at the gate later, sitting on the grass with knives in hand. She’s in the last hour of her watch shift, eyes tired and a little glazed. It’s sunset after a slow day, Carol and Valkyrie’s quiet chatter in the background as they plant new seeds in the ground, food for the summer. 

“Hi,” Hope leans her face towards the sun, eyes half open, smile stretching on her face. 

“Did I miss anything?” Scott asks, sitting down beside her, fingers knotting in the grass. 

“Not really. They’re quiet today,” Hope nods to the forest beyond the fence, gesturing to the zombies at large. 

“Maybe they’re all dying off,” Scott suggests hopefully. The chaotic supply run from three days ago would suggest otherwise, but Hope humours him for a second. 

“Maybe.”

They sit in the silence, feeling the sunlight in their hair, listening to the birds and Carol and Valkyrie’s melodic laughter.

“We’re… we’re a thing right?” Scott blurts, before he can stop or second guess himself. He feels dumb as soon as he speaks. Labels definitely don’t matter at the end of the world. 

“Huh?” Hope squints against the sun. 

“Us. Me and you. We’re, like, a  _ thing.  _ Right? Or did I misread the situation horribly?” Scott winces a little, bracing for impact. 

“Oh.  _ Us _ . Sure. Yeah, a thing. Sure.”

“I mean, we don’t  _ have  _ to be a thing. Only if you want to. It’s not a big deal.”

Hope pauses, considering. Framed in this light, Scott’s not sure she’s ever looked so beautiful. “No. I’d like it,” Hope smiles, a little shyly. Scott couldn’t stop himself smiling back at her if he tried. 

“Ok then.”

“Ok.”

They sit in a comfortable silence, drinking in the way the world feels calm, the small moments of peace. Carol and Valkyrie have dirt smudges on their cheeks, digging in the background. Hope’s hands are warm from the sunlight beneath Scott’s. On evenings like these it’s easy to imagine the world becoming a nice place again. 

“Scott,” Hope breaks the silence. Scott’s sure, from the time of her voice, that she’s going to take back what she’d said, realise it was a mistake. But; “we need to leave,” is what she says, and Scott’s half relieved, half upset. He knew this was coming. He also hoped he was wrong. Hope swallows. “We can come back after.”

It’s easy, being here. Easy to exist, easy to  _ live _ , easy to imagine carving out a whole life here. It wouldn’t be the same definition of a life as before. No house or career or big fancy wedding. No vacations halfway across the world. The milestones which humans used to mark out their worlds with are obsolete now. But they can make new milestones, in this little corner of safety. Scott can see them, in his head. He and Hope growing closer, Cassie growing up. Marking Groot’s height on the wall with each passing year. Hope and Gamora teaching him how to fight. Maybe there will be weddings- small and cobbled together and technically unofficial - but weddings all the same. Peter and MJ and Carol and Valkyrie...Scott and Hope. 

The problem with that image, with the idea of having a life here, is that Scott knows how it would feel. There would be a threat hanging over each and every one of their heads every single day. Terror as the fencing around them started to rust. The zombies outside growing hungrier and hungrier. 

If there’s a chance to stop that, no matter how remote, Scott knows they owe it to the world to try. To Cassie. To everyone within the base. To all of the other survivors out there, locked behind gates like they are, or wandering forests, holed up in cities, in boarded up houses in the suburbs. In big groups or totally alone. Journeying or still. Everyone deserves a second chance. 

“Scott?” Hope prompts him, sounding hesitant. Like she’s ready to close herself off again, ready to leave by herself if she needs to. Picturing Hope wandering the country alone again is enough to make Scott physically wince. 

“Yeah. Yeah. You’re right. We have somewhere to be,” Scott agrees sadly. He stretches his hand towards her, rubbing his thumb over her knuckles in the grass. Letting her know she never has to do this alone again. 

“You don’t h-” Hope starts. 

“Hope,” Scott interrupts her. “I’m coming with you.”

She doesn’t try to question him again, just nods, flipping her hand over to squeeze his. They’re in this together.

 

They spend the next day planning. Hope’s mapping the journey, and Scott’s mostly trying to decide what to do about Cassie. The thought of going without her makes Scott want to scream. He can’t imagine being separated from her, living with the unknown for however long he’s gone. Not knowing whether he’ll ever be able to make it back to her. Not knowing whether she’s still there  _ to  _ make it back to. 

But taking her with them makes him want to scream too. Scott’s noticed the difference in Cassie since they’ve been here, how she’s got something inherently  _ Cassie  _ back. Her biting sarcasm and her laughter with Peter and MJ. Scott doesn’t want her to lose that. He doesn’t want to take her out there and risk losing  _ her _ . Both options seem grey and too terrible to comprehend. His decisions, as her parent, were never supposed to be this hard. 

Scott knows that if he asks Cassie, she’ll tell him her answer immediately. She’ll want to come too, will be lacing up her boots before he’s even finished the question. And he’s always known he wants to raise an independent kid, who has a say in her own life decisions, is allows to make her own mistakes, but  _ not like this.  _ This is a mistake she won’t come back from. 

 

Carol overhears Scott and Hope discussing it quietly in the corner of the kitchen, long after dinner is over, after Cassie has fallen asleep, after Thor has successfully beaten every single one of them at arm wrestles.  

“You’re going somewhere?” Carol’s standing in the doorway, leaning against it like she’s comfortable, has been listening a while. 

“Uh-” Scott turns to Hope to answer. They weren’t planning on telling anyone until their plans were concrete. 

“Yes. We...have someplace we need to be,” Hope says. Neither of them is sure how people will react to the news that there might be a scientist who might have some semblance of a cure. Scott doesn’t want to offer false hope. Hope’s worried they’ll try and talk them out of it. 

“Pre-existing engagement?” Carol raises her eyebrows. 

“Something like that,” Hope agrees. 

Carol studies them carefully, in the way that always makes Scott a little nervous. 

“You coming back after?”

“If things go right. Sure,” Hope supplies. 

“How far away is it?” Carol wants to know. 

“Two weeks’ walk. Give or take,” Hope says. 

Carol gives a low whistle. “Must be some place pretty important.”

“It is.”

Carol narrows her eyes a little, and Scott can tell her mind is working overtime. 

“I can get you there faster,” she says, and both Scott and Hope stand up a little straighter. 

“How? Pegasus?” Scott guesses. 

“Nah. Faster. But I’d need to know where you’re going.”

Scott looks at Hope, and she looks right back. Takes in her fear and uncertainty, her dread at the thought of two more weeks on the road, her reluctance to drag anyone else into this. 

It’s Scott’s  _ job  _ to fight for Cassie, to speak up for her when she’s uncertain. He thinks, now, for the first time in a long time, it might his job to do the same for someone else now, too. Once upon a time, he and Maggie (and it still stings like hell whenever he thinks of her and Paxton. Their last day. Their cold bodies on the tiled floor of the kitchen he’d celebrated Cassie’s birthday in just weeks before.) had fought for each other, had stood together as a united front. Now it’s him and Hope. Him and Hope and Cassie against the world. 

So Scott makes the decision for all of them, and tells Carol everything. 

 

Carol wants to know how sure they are, once Scott and Hope have worked together to tell her everything. Honesty is the best policy here, Scott figures, if they really want Carol to trust them, if they want the kind of help they’d never even dreamed of. 

“We can’t be sure,” it’s Hope who responds. “We can’t know whether Doctor Banner is even still alive. Or whether he’s got any kind of concrete cure. Whether it’s even  _ possible _ to…” she trails off, shuffling subconsciously closer to Scott. All three of them are sitting at the countertop on the high stools, voices dripping with tiredness. Scott pulls an arm around Hope’s shoulders, thumb slipping under the fabric of her tank top strap. 

“We don’t know, Carol,” Scott continues. “But look, we figure we need to try. If we fail we can just...we can just come back here. Live as we are right now. But...if we succeed, if we find the Doctor and if Hope can help with a cure...well, isn’t that worth the risk?”

Carol’s quiet for a long while, looking down at her folded hands on the countertop, deep in thought. Scott knows that Carol is an expert at making hard decisions. It was her job, her whole life, once upon a time. And she joined the Air Force in the first place because it was something she was good at. Making the tough calls when no one else wanted to. She’s trained on it, thrives on it, knows how to weigh up the pros and cons, losses and gains, without her emotions getting in the way. Whatever she decides now, Scott thinks, will be in the best interest of every single person on this base. 

“This is big,” Carol says, after what feels like ten minutes of dead silence. “I need to ask everyone else what they think. I’m not going to risk anything unless they’re all willing to risk it too.”

Scott looks at Hope, feels the way her shoulders loosen a little beneath his arm, her muscles slackening. “Ok. Ok, that’s fair. You can tell them,” she nods, relief flooding her voice. 

 

They wait until morning to tell the others. Cassie’s out cold on the couch, so Scott pulls a blanket up to her chin, closes the rec room door softly behind him. He finds Hope in their shared room, sitting on her bunk with knees pulled into her chest, chin resting atop them. She looks more afraid than he’s ever seen her before, smaller than she looks in the light of day. Hope’s got a facade, something Scott realises she built up a long time ago. Rock solid and almost impenetrable. He thinks it’s the only thing that holds her together, but in the long, dark hours it comes down, and she lets herself fall apart. 

Scott was scared to touch her, once. Scared she wouldn’t want it, scared it would make both of them vulnerable. But everything is different now, and Scott doesn’t hesitate to sit beside her and pull her into his arms. She doesn’t cry, and neither does he, but their breaths come shaky and fast and desperate, his into her hair, hers into his collarbone. He whispers promises he knows he’ll never be able to keep. She lets herself believe them, just for a few hours. They fall asleep tangled together on top of the blankets. 

 

Hope’s gone when Scott wakes up the next morning. He panics for a second, waking up in an empty room, the base seeming too quiet, strides to the door in five seconds flat and rips it open. There are low voices coming from the rec room, so Scott follows them, feeling calm flood his veins only when he catches sight of Hope and Cassie on one of the couches, sitting with May and MJ. 

“Hey. Hey,” he slots in next to Cassie. 

“Are you ok, dad?” She asks. The sun is just starting to appear through the curtains, weak and watered down. 

“Yeah. I’m ok, Cass,” Scott says, not sure how much he means it this time. 

“There’s a lot of them out there this morning,” May says, moving to the window to look out of the crack where the curtains join. 

“What?” Scott’s blood runs cold. They were supposed to be getting out of here. They need to  _ leave.  _ They don’t need this situation to get any worse. 

“Fifteen, maybe twenty,” MJ supplies. Cassie grips Scott’s hand. “They’re getting really hungry I guess.”

“Well it’s...it’s nothing we haven’t faced before,” Scott tries to sound optimistic. He’s pretty sure he’s failing, from the looks on everyone’s faces. 

 

The atmosphere in the base has changed. Scott feels it, like an electric charge. He isn’t sure if it’s because of the increase in the number of zombies at the fence, or the fact that everyone can sense something is going on, the tense air surrounding Hope, Scott, and Carol. They eat a quiet breakfast of protein bars, the oatmeal having run out, sharing a bottle of water out between all of them, before Gamora snaps and demands to know what’s going on, sick of the glances between Scott and Hope. 

Carol calls them all to order, and together, the three of them tell everything. 

“A cure?” Gamora spits, once they’re done. “Jesus, Hope, is this what you were trying to tell me before? When we were…?”

“Yeah. I...I didn’t know how…” Hope trails off. Scott looks around the room, taking in everyone’s expression. Peter and MJ’s fascination, May’s shock, Thor and Valkyrie’s indecision, Carol’s determination, Groot’s vacant expression, Cassie’s… Cassie looks betrayed, refusing to meet Scott’s eye. He realises how it must feel, to be the last to find out that your parent was planning on leaving without you. He just hoped she understands his reasoning, gets that he’d do just about anything to keep her safe. Even if the safest place is not by his side. 

“We have more of a chance of getting there if we all go together,” Carol tells them. She’s taken up position as leader, standing at the edge of the room, arms folded across her chest, feet planted squarely. Scott wonders how many times she’s done this, over all of the years of her life. “But we won’t go unless we’re all in agreement. ‘Cos we only get one shot at this.”

One shot. Scott knows what that means. If they fail, they die. But it’s a risk for the human race. Not just the people in this room. 

“You really want to risk everything on a  _ maybe?”  _ Valkyrie speaks up. She doesn’t sound angry, or scared, just like she’s double checking. 

“Scott and Hope believe in it enough that they’re willing to risk their lives for it. Seems like if we can help, we should,” Carol says, and Scott can tell she’s thought about it hard, probably been awake for half the night deciding. 

“How would we even get there? You want us to walk? We won’t last a week out there,” Gamora says, gesturing to the window. 

“She’s got a point,” May agrees. “We’ve been through enough as it is.”

“C’mon May, you don’t want to help save the world?” Peter asks. 

“Not if it means risking you, sweetheart.”

“We wouldn’t be walking,” Carol interrupts. “There’s a plane. It’s...it  _ was  _ our emergency exit strategy. The last plane in a working condition. It’s got enough fuel to get us there. One way trip.”

“One way?” Thor asks, leaning forwards in his chair. 

“One way,” Carol confirms. “We can figure out a way back once we get there.”

There’s silence again. Scott just has one question. “And do we have a pilot?”

“Right here,” Carol raises a hand. “I can fly. And I’m damn good at it.”

There’s no one there to validate her claim. But no one doubts her, even for a second. 

“The only problem,” Carol says, hands dropping to her sides, “is that the plane is on the airfield.”

“So, what’s the problem with that?” Hope asks. 

“The airfield isn’t in the fence. It’s around three miles north of here. And I’ve been past it on supply runs. It’s been compromised.”

“Compromised? As in-” Gamora starts. 

“As in there are  _ zombies  _ on the airfield. Yes,” it’s Valkyrie who confirms it. Everyone looks around at each other, unsure what to say. The thought of trying to fight their way through zombies across an airfield is unappealing to say the least. 

“If that’s what we need to do, then that’s what we need to do,” Peter summarises their thinking. The thing nobody wants to admit. 

Sometimes, in life, Scott knows it’s necessary to go through the minefield of crap before getting to the good thing. It’s just that the minefield is usually metaphorical. 

Across from him, Cassie is leaning back, glaring at the ground like it’s personally offended her. This is one of those metaphorical mines, he thinks. He made an active choice not to tell her about the plans, and this is his penance. 

Guilt, cruel and familiar, settles over Scott. He doesn’t know if he did the right thing, by not telling her. He doesn’t know if leaving with her and everyone else is the right thing. What he  _ does  _ know is that Cassie’s safe right now, alive and whole and under the same roof as him. Scott’s going to stay grateful for that for as long as it’s the truth. Going to appreciate every minute they get together. 

He tears his gaze away from Cassie, pushing down the urge to apologise profusely to her. There’ll be time, later, to explain everything. Instead, he tunes back into the conversation, helps Hope field questions about Doctor Banner and the journey ahead. Carol fields the questions about getting to the plane. They talk it out until there’s nothing more left to say. Scott tries to convince himself the apocalypse hasn’t made him a terrible father. 

 

When the discussion is done, they vote on it. They’re going to go. They’re all in. The biggest gamble of their lives. 

  
  


Cassie resolutely ignores Scott and Hope for the rest of the day. After no less than six attempts to talk to her, Scott follows Hope and May’s advice and leaves her some space to cool off. He tries to busy himself with Hope, as the base takes the day to prepare to leave. None of them is sure how long they’ll be gone for, or if there will even be a way to get back. They pack backpacks full of food and jugs of water, spare clothes, bandages, as many weapons as they can carry. They plan to wake up early to duct tape their arms and legs, Valkyrie and Thor pointing out that it’s near impossible to bite through duct tape. There’s some debate about what to do with Pegasus, but Carol confirms he’ll fit on the plane, and Valkyrie isn’t about to leave him here, defenceless. She tapes magazines to his legs and feeds him scraps from the vegetable garden, kisses his nose and tells him he’s a good horse. 

 

Hope obsesses over checking their backpacks. Her hands shake as she unpacks and repacks all three of their bags no less than four times. She explains her reasoning to Scott. The first time it’s just to make sure they have everything, the second is in case their separated, so they each have enough supplies to survive a few days by themselves. The third is to find space to add more weapons. The fourth is to check that the stuff they might need in an emergency is easily accessible. Scott stops her before time five, after a silent and hasty dinner of canned black beans and over cooked pasta, catching both of her hands with his own as she stands at the foot of the bed. 

“Hope,” he says softly, gripping her fingers tightly. “It’s alright. You can stop. We have everything we need.”

“But what if we don’t? What if there’s something we need and we leave it here? What if- what if I don’t check properly and one of us  _ dies  _ because of it?” Her voice cracks a little as she finishes the sentence.

“Hey,” he drops her hands, pulls her in close instead. She rests her chin on his shoulder. He runs circles on her back. “If anything happens out there, it won’t be your fault, ok? I’m not saying nothing bad will happen, but it’ll be the fault of this shitty, shitty world. Not you.”

Hope sniffs in response. “But I’m the reason we’re all going. What if it’s pointless? And we wind up dead because of it?”

Scott shakes his head, holding Hope tighter. “Everyone going is old enough to make that choice. Besides Groot, but that’s Gamora’s call,” he shrugs. “They have all of the information, they’re responsible enough to decide what to do with it. It’s not on you, Hope. I promise.”

She doesn’t argue, but Scott gets the impression that she doesn’t accept anything he’s saying, returning to tidying up their room wordlessly. 

 

The morning comes much too quickly. It’s the kind of night Scott has been hoping would stretch on forever, but he jerks awake before dawn, head full of nightmares, yesterday’s memories rushing in like a tsunami, jarring and sore. 

They’re leaving. 

They might not come back. 

Cassie’s still mad at him. 

Two of those things, he can deal with. The third, not so much. They’re headed into the unknown, and Scott’s never going to forgive himself if something happens to himself or Cassie whilst she’s angry. He needs to make this right. 

She spent the night on the couch again, and Scott tiptoes our in the darkness to find her, cracks of distant light appearing around the curtains in the rec room. She’s sleeping, face pushed into the cushions, eyelids twitching. Scott’s pulled into memories for a minute, almost drowns in them. He’s watching Cassie as a newborn, when she’d only sleep in his or Maggie’s arms, not at all interested in the expensive crib they’d used half their baby savings on. He’s watching her after a birthday party, aged two or three, icing on her cheeks, sugar crash overtaking her eyes. He’s watching her aged seven, after he gets out of prison and Maggie finally lets him have visitation again. She's one and four and eight and eleven, she's fourteen and it’s the week before the apocalypse and she falls asleep on the couch in Scott’s home, upset after failing a Spanish test. Scott promises he’ll ask Luis to help her study for the make-up test. Cassie falls asleep, and Scott wants to call the school and yell at them for making his little girl sad. He doesn’t, knows it’s a dumb irrational thought, settles for lowering the volume on the movie they’re watching and letting her sleep instead. He’d give damned near anything to go back. 

“Peanut,” Scott shakes her gently, wishing he could let her sleep for as long as she wants. But sleep is a luxury at the end of the world. He needs to talk to her before the base comes alive, before they start duct taping their limbs. “You gotta wake up.”

“No,” she grumbles, squeezing her eyes shut tighter, followed by “dad?”

“Yeah. It’s me, Cassie. You need to wake up now.”

She groans, hand moving to cover her eyes. “What is it?”

“I just wanted to talk to you. Before we leave today.”

“Oh.”

“Can you wake up for me?”

“‘M mad at you,” she remembers aloud. 

“I know. I know that. Can you give me a chance to explain?” 

Cassie moves her hand, frowns at Scott, studying his face intently. After a few seconds she sighs, pushes herself up, and throws the blanket to the other end of the couch. 

Maybe it’s stupid, but they’re leaving today anyway, will be heading out there on their way within an hour, at Scott’s best guess. It’s been a really long time since he sat and watched a sunrise. It feels like something important, on a day like today. So, he takes the key from the spot Carol hides it each night, Cassie following behind, and opens the front door, as little as he possibly can whilst still being able to fit through the gap. 

“Dad? What are we doing?” Cassie hisses, hesitantly stepping out behind Scott. 

He checks the area, finding a few zombies out by the gate, but none inside. The base remains safe. Scott drops down on the grass, just outside the door, and after a few seconds Cassie joins him too. The sky is pale, the first brush strokes of sunlight kissing it pink above the trees. 

“You know you were born around sunrise,” Scott tells Cassie, suddenly missing Maggie so much it’s a physical ache. The good friend and co-parent she was at the end. 

“Really?” Cassie’s voice is a little shaky. 

“Yeah,” Scott smiles. “Your mom was in labor for over thirty hours. I think she was about ready to murder me by the end of it.”

Cassie’s silent for a beat. “You were probably being super annoying.”

“Hey, I was great! I bought your mom as many ice chips as she wanted!” Scott insists, and Cassie’s biting back a smile. “She still wanted to murder me. All through the night, until suddenly, the sky was turning these beautiful colours. And the whole world felt peaceful, like it was holding its breath, just waiting for you. Then there you were.” Scott looks at Cassie through watery eyes, finds her eyes sparkling with tears too. “I never wanted anything to hurt you, on that day, holding you by the window to show you the world. But that’s part of parenthood, Peanut, realising that your kid  _ has  _ to get hurt to grow up. Can’t have one without the other. All you can do is try to get life to pull its punches. I just never expected the damned zombie apocalypse to come mess my plans up.”

Cassie snorts, “I don’t think anyone expected that.”

“Yeah, well. Here we are, this is where we’re at,” Scott gestures around to the world at large. “But I’m still trying to get life to pull its punches for you, Cassie. I always will be. Do you see where I’m going with this?”

“Are you trying to convince me you’re still the world’s greatest grandma?” There are tears tracking their way down her cheeks now. 

“Pretty much,” Scott nods. He presses a kiss to Cassie’s temple. “But really, Cass, I’m telling you that, as your parent, I have to take care of you. Even if that means, sometimes, you’re the last to find something out. I’m not doing it because I think you’re a little kid, or because I don’t trust you. I’m doing it because it’s what I think is best.”

“It just felt like you were lying,” Cassie admits, swiping her tears away. “You and Hope were just going to  _ leave _ .”

“I know. I know. And I’m really sorry, Peanut.”

The birds are waking up, sun moving higher. Cassie sighs. “Can you just...try to be honest with me? I mean, I get it. I know there’s some stuff you can’t tell me. But the big stuff. The stuff I need to know, to trust you. Please?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I can do that.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

They sit for a while longer. Scott can hear movement in the building behind them. 

“I miss mom,” Cassie says, out of nowhere, tears in her voice. 

“Oh, Peanut,” Scott puts an arm around her shoulder and places another kiss in her hair. “I know you do. I do, too. I even miss  _ Paxton _ , and I never thought I’d say that.”

“ _ Dad _ ,” Cassie kicks him softly, but she’s smiling a little. “He was a good guy.”

“Yeah. He was.”

“Do you think mom would be proud of me?” Cassie asks next. 

“ _ So  _ proud,” Scott doesn’t miss a beat. “So proud. You’re still  _ you _ , even in this crap-fest of a world. Hell, I’m proud of you every single day, and I know she would be.”

Cassie sighs again, but this time Scott thinks it’s more like a sigh of relief. He wonders how long she’s been worrying about this, and makes it his mission to let Cassie know he’s proud of her as often as possible. They sit for a few more minutes, as the fire in the sky fades to blue, and then stand up to face the day. 

 

The three of them duct tape each other’s forearms, calves and wrists, Hope handing Cassie the leather jacket carol had given to her when they went to search for Scott. 

“But it’s yours,” Cassie protests, as Hope shakes the jacket, encouraging her to take it.

“And I’m giving it to you. I didn’t rescue you from that pharmacy for nothing.”

“You didn’t  _ rescue me  _ from the pharmacy-”

“Cassie. Take the jacket. It’s important to me that you make it through this.”

Cassie pauses for a best, deciding what to do, before reaching out and throwing her arms around Hope’s shoulders in a hug. Hope’s stunned for a second before hugging back. It’s been a long time since she’s been hugged by anyone other than Scott, aside from the brief ‘we survived’ hugs from Gamora during the time they travelled together. 

“Thank you, Hope. For everything,” Cassie says, duct tape on her arms crinkling in Hope’s ears. 

Hope wants to thank her back, but she doesn’t quite have the words. If she hadn’t followed her instincts all those weeks ago and gone with Cassie to the cabin, her life would be a whole lot different by now. Sure, she’d probably have found Doctor Banner for now. Would know whether a cure was possible, would answer the loud question repeating in her head. That, or she’d be dead. One or the other. Either way, her life would lack meaning. She’d be  _ surviving _ , the way she had since her parents gave up their lives for her own. She, Scott and Cassie had saved one another. Had given each other everything. 

 

Hope has lots of things she wants to say before they go. She wants to tell Cassie she’s proud of her. She wants to tell Gamora she made her life worth living at a time when it felt like nothing could. She wants to thank Carol for this place, this corner of quiet in a world of horror. Mostly, she wants to speak to Scott. Whispers in the middle of the night or steady words in a field in the sunshine. Words to cherish. Words that he could keep with him, if…

Hope keeps the words. She doesn’t know how to boil everything she’s feeling down into sentences, string them up to paragraphs, make them mean what she really wants to. 

(Deep down, Hope knows it doesn’t matter if she tells them or not. They know. That’s all that’s important.)

 

They leave the safety of the base under the azure blue sky, sun up above. Hope feels strange, to be leaving. She thought she’d got past attachments to places, but not so long ago she thought she was past attachments to people too, and look how that turned out. She walks from room to room whilst everyone’s finishing getting ready, saying a quiet goodbye to the place where she’d found a part of herself she left in the research centre on the day her parents died. Or maybe she lost it long before that, leaving it on her desk in the high rise building on the day the planet changed. She doesn’t know. What she does know is that this place bought it back, filled up something sharp and hollow in her chest. And maybe she’s not great at saying bye to people, but she’s going to say bye to this place. This place that she may or may not see again. She says goodbye to the cold bathroom and the corridors she still finds creepy, to the book room she’d found Cassie and MJ holed up in too many times to count, to the cosy jumble of a rec room where this group of strangers had become friends, where she danced with Scott just weeks ago when they felt as close to invincible as the apocalypse will let you feel. She spends longest saying bye to the bedroom. The tiny shared space where she’d found her family. 

 

“We’ll be back,” Scott assures Hope, words only for her, accompanied by a hand squeeze as the group snakes towards the gates. 

Carol and Thor, Valkyrie and Groot on Pegasus, Gamora and May, Cassie, Peter and MJ, Scott and Hope. They’re rag tag and tired and terrified and uncertain. But they’re together. And they’ve survived this far. If Hope was a betting woman, if there was anyone still left alive to bet with, she’d bet on their survival. 

There are a handful of zombies along the fence, groaning and reaching through the chain link, skin grey and peeling. They used to make Hope wince, but now she’s pulling her gun up to eye level, moving out in formation as they practiced. They’ve got weapons and silencers, bags stashed with ammo. The zombies don’t last long, hitting the ground with thuds and wheezes, Thor and Carol pushing through a gap in the gate to make sure the zombies are finished off. And then they’re all through, gate sealed up behind them, open road stretching out ahead. Three miles to go. 

The base is in a remote area, thinned out houses surrounding it amongst fields and forest. Hope’s gotten to know the area quite well, knows where the zombies like to congregate and places they don’t go much. She kills three on the road a mile in, fast ones, freshly undead by the looks of them, flesh not yet rotting. When she’s not shooting, she keeps one hand on her gun, one on Scott. Fingers around his wrist, or entwined with his own, or pressed into his lower back. Hope wouldn’t admit it out loud, but this scares her. It’s just a few miles, compared to the tens she walked daily with Scott and Cassie, but walking with a group this big, four of them just kids, when the stakes are so high and they’re so close to getting to Banner, feels like a huge risk. It felt a hundred miles safer when it was just three of them, just her and Scott and Cassie. The fear felt more spread out then, rather than the condensed terror of walking this short distance, knowing there’s going to be a battle at the end of it. 

They don’t speak. It’s like everyone is holding their breath, just waiting for the next attack, planning what they’re going to do when they get to the airfield. They walk to the backdrop of Pegasus’ hooves on the broken asphalt, Groot muttering under his breath. One foot in front of the other, Hope counts their steps in groups of five until Carol tells them they’ve arrived. 

 

The airfield is marked out by a crumbling black fighter jet inside a rusted fence, half smashed into the very end of the runway, cockpit broken into pieces. Hope can’t help but wonder when it happened, the crash, whether there’s a zombie wandering around in a pilot uniform, whether they burned up on impact. Her mind conjures up morbid thoughts these days like it used to conjure up lunch ideas. 

“That’s our hangar,” Carol points beyond the broken plane, beyond the runway to a looming grey building on the other side of the field, a collection of three. “Hangar B.”

“Do we know how bad it is in there?” May asks, wincing a little. 

“No. We do not,” Carol answers, voice void of emotion, matter of fact. 

“So we just…” Scott trails off, looking a little lost. 

“We fight our way to the plane,” Valkyrie supplies. This is what they’ve all chosen. There’s no turning back now. 

 

It’s decided that those under the age of eighteen, including Pegasus, will wait on the runway, whilst Carol, Valkyrie, Thor, May, Gamora, Scott and Hope get through any zombies in the hangar. All four of the younger ones protest loudly, stopping only when Carol points out how much time they’re wasting by arguing. They could have been in and out by now. 

Hope watched as Scott hugs Cassie goodbye, places kisses on her forehead, tells her he loves her, he’s proud of her, he’ll see her in two minutes. 

_ Two minutes _ . 

Hope doesn’t tell him, but she wishes he hadn’t said that. Because last time, two minutes had turned into a hell of a lot longer, into him almost dying, into Hope and Cassie enduring their own personal brand of torture. Two minutes, in Hope’s experience, doesn’t usually mean two minutes. 

Still.

She hugs Cassie goodbye too. 

The adults start for the hangar, and none of them look back. 

 

Carol activated the main door, the metal yawning open far too slowly as the seven of them stand in wait, guns aimed and ready, on the far too quiet airfield. The first groans come as veins of light make their way into the hangar, catching on dusty metal, moving up to ripped up shoes and rotting limbs and  _ zombies.  _ Hope counts twelve. Then things get blurry, time distorting reality; the results of an equation of adrenaline plus terror plus sensory overload plus near certain death. 

They advance forwards, Hope hitting two of the zombies in the head, kill shots, one through the neck, finished off by May. Hope can see Valkyrie with her knife, piercing the skull of a gruesome looking zombie, flesh peeling from it's face, can see Scott out of the corner of her eye pulling the shell of a woman away from Carol. There’s gunfire and  _ waves  _ of zombies, trapped in the hangar, and Carol points out their plane, with a clear path for it to exit the hangar, and they’re all running as fast as they can towards it. Hope fires on anything that moves, leading the pack with Carol, and she’s  _ feet  _ from the plane when she looks to her left and finds Gamora clashing with a beast of a shell of a man, his jaw inches from her neck. Hope doesn’t stop to think or look around, just steps left around a pillar, raises her gun and puts a stop to the zombie, an inch away from Gamora’s flesh. 

But just as there was empty air in front of Hope a half second ago, there’s a face now, pale and rotting and  _ screaming _ , hands on Hope’s arms, reaching it's gawping mouth towards her, hungry and desperate and insane. And before she can stop it, the thing she’s spent a whole year dreading and avoiding and crying and dreaming about happens. It happens so quickly that it doesn’t seem real. 

The zombie sinks its teeth into her collarbone, a little exposed in the tussle, not covered by leather or duct tape. 

The bite hurts. The knowledge of what comes next hurts more. 

 

Thor pulls the zombie from Hope, puts a bullet through its eye and it drops down dead at her feet. It’s too late. It’s too late it’s too late it’s  _ too late.  _

Hope’s frozen to the spot, pulled towards the plane by Thor until she’s right at the steps and coming to her senses. She can’t get on that plane. She’s going to turn. She’s going to lose her mind and  _ die  _ and wake up a rotting shell. If she gets on that plane she’s going to kill all of them, or rather, the parasite taking over her body is going to kill all of them. Hope’s going to be gone. 

Just gone. 

If she’ll be gone within twenty-four hours she may as well get it over with, put a stop to this, decide her own damned fate. Maybe it won’t be so bad. Maybe it won’t hurt. Maybe she’ll get to see her parents again. 

But her hand is shaky on her gun, she can’t bring herself to pick it up no matter how much she wants to, feeling herself being pulled up into the plane by Thor’s strong arms, pushed into a seat. She wants to scream at them, ask them if they can see the blood pooling on her shirt or if they’ve all gone blind, ask them if they want to risk everything for her or if they’ll let her just get on with it. 

And then there’s a face swimming into her view that makes her heart really and truly break. Scott. Caring, kind, funny Scott. Her family. 

The damn breaks, Hope realises the enormity of the fact that her life is going to end, all of the things she won’t be able to do, the world she isn’t going to be a part of any more. Twenty four hours. Twenty four hours and  _ god  _ it hurts. The plane roars to life. Hope chokes out a sob. 

  
  


It takes Scott approximately twenty seconds to realise what’s happened, and approximately twenty-one seconds for his world to fall apart. The plane roads to life, begins to taxi onto the runway, and Scott just about stops breathing, his throat closing up. He wants to lay on the ground of this stupid cruel world and scream until he can’t any longer. It’s not fair. None of this, nothing in this reality is  _ fair.  _

But there are people relying on him.  _ Hope  _ is relying on him, so he cups her face in both hands, feels her shaking with sobs, looks into her eyes and pushes the image of the misty, blood shot whites of the eyes of the recently changed. Because that’s not going to be Hope. It’s  _ not. _

“Carol? Is there- there’s something we can do right? There’s a way of stopping this?” Scott pulls Hope in close, lets her sob into him, tries not to imagine her body cold and lifeless. 

“Let me fly the plane, Scott,” Carol says, slowing down as they approach the kids and Pegasus. 

“What?” 

“Let me fly the plane. Think about where we’re headed.”

The scientist. The guy Hope is so sure can end this. So sure she was willing to do this, to risk her life to get there. 

“We need to check the wound,” May tells Scott, as Thor and Valkyrie buys themselves opening the cargo hold door for Pegasus. 

Scott nods, loosens his grip on Hope. “Hope? Can you sit up? I need to check the...I need to check the bite. It’s going to be ok. You’re going to be ok,” they’re instructions as much as promises, because Scott can’t possibly live in a world without Hope. He doesn’t know how he ever did. 

He holds her shoulders, helps her up, eyes immediately settling on the rawness around her collarbone, the blood, the definitive teeth marks. The group got a second chance when they thought MJ had been bitten. This time it’s for real. 

The plane stills, and May is handing Scott basic first aid items; alcohol wipes and a dressing. Like that’s going to fix it. Like that’s going to rid Hope’s body of the poison coursing through it. 

Cassie’s at his shoulder before he can start cleaning the wound, smile of relief slipping from her lips the second she lays eyes on Hope’s, red from the sobs. Another second and Cassie finds the bite. 

“ _ No. No, no, no _ ,” she grips Scott’s shoulder. “Daddy? No.” Like if she says it enough, it will stop being true. Like she’s five and telling him she doesn’t want to eat her dinner. 

Scott doesn’t know what to say. He’s had to give his fifteen-year-old enough bad news in the past year to last four lifetimes, can’t stand the thought of turning to face her now. 

“It’s ok, Cassie. It’s ok,” it’s Hope who does, voice just above a whisper.

“No, it’s not. It’s  _ not  _ ok,” Cassie’s growling her words, fierce and determined, and Scott’s hands are shaking as he tears open the alcohol wipe. 

“Cassie,” it’s Peter, gently trying to pull Cassie away, and Scott’s never been so thankful.

“ _ No. _ ”

“Give your dad some space, Cass,” Peter suggests, and Scott feels Cassie’s hand leave his shoulder. 

He gets to work, cleaning the wound, hating himself as he feels Hope flinch as the alcohol touches her skin. If this were any other kind of wound, this step would be lifesaving, help stop the hot anger of infection. In this case, it feels pointless. The idea of a scientist existing who has any way to stop this virus feels far away and agonisingly impossible. Still, Scott cleans, and when he’s done he applies the clean dressing. His hands grow still afterwards, and they’re in the air now, the plane rumbling beneath them. But now there’s nothing for him to physically  _ do, _ he feels more helpless than he’s ever felt in his life. 

The whole plane is silent and somber, Gamora across from them holding Groot on her lap like a lifeline, Valkyrie and Carol up front, Thor patching up a graze on May’s hand. Cassie, Peter and MJ slumped at the back with the horse. All Scott can do is hold Hope tightly, her hair tickling his chin, her hands making fists in his shirt. He’s spent this entire zombie apocalypse wishing for it to be over, wishing to go back in time to  _ before _ , to bustling streets and his neighbor who played music too loud at three a.m, to the string of minimum wage jobs he took when he got out of prison, to his old tiny apartment with the busted A/C unit. All of the things that made his old life difficult had felt so insignificant, had felt kind of beautiful once the apocalypse started. 

Now, he still wants that time machine, but he’ll take twenty four hours. He’d give anything for them, a collection of minutes adding up to one day, so he can go back and sit inside the safety of yesterday. 

“Scott,” Hope’s voice is crystal clear, steady, certain. She leans back, pushing the tears from her cheeks clumsily, looks him in the eyes like hers are made of steel. 

Scott drinks her in, the smattering of freckles across her nose, the way her hair sweeps across her forehead. She’s real and solid and alive. He’s going to hold onto that. 

“Scott, listen,” she reaches for him, finger on his chin. 

“What? What is it?” He asks, willing to do anything to help her right now. 

“I need you to promise me something.”

Scott swallows, wishes Hope’s words didn’t sound like dying ones. “What is it?” He asks, hesitant. Afraid. 

“I…” She’s still shaking. Scott runs his fingers through her hair, focuses on the rise and fall of her chest, her body keeping her going, making every second count. “I don’t want to...to be one of those things. I don’t want that. You can’t let me. You need to...end it. Before that.”

Scott has trouble wrapping his mind around what Hope’s asking. “The Doctor will have something, Hope. Banner will - he’ll fix this. He’ll fix it all, ok?” Scott needs to believe it. Has to believe in some kind of miracle in a world where they don’t exist any longer. 

But Hope’s shaking her head, defiant. “He might not even be alive. He almost definitely won’t have any kind of a cure. Scott, we need to be realistic about this. This is-” her voice cracks. She clears her throat angrily. “This is my reality. I want to go out on  _ my  _ terms. I just need your help, ok? Just promise me you won’t let me change.”

“Hope,” Scott’s own voice cracks, tears stinging his eyes. “I..” He’s about to protest, disagree with her with every fibre of his being, but he stops, puts himself in his shoes, pictures the daily destruction and death and horror they’ve witnessed. Scott loves her. Really, truly loves her. The kind of love which fills up happy spaces and agonising one’s too. The kind of love which means he needs to promise her this. Which means he needs to see this through. 

But not until every other avenue is exhausted. Scott Lang does not give up without a fight. “Hope,” he cups her face, gentle. “Let’s see what Banner can do. Let’s just see. If there’s nothing…” he swallows again, pushing back the lump rising in his throat. “If there’s nothing, then I promise. I won’t let you become one of them.”

Hope searches his eyes and finds the truth, nods once and then lets herself fall back against Scott’s shoulder. 

He counts up the seconds and her breaths, never knowing breathing to sound so precious. Scott can feel her getting sick, the virus taking hold. Her body getting warmer and weaker and greyer. He can feel her slipping away from him, away from this world, away from the Hope she was hours ago. She’s slipping, but he’s not going to let her fall. He’s going to hold her hands until she finds steady ground again. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> IM SORRY!!
> 
> And yes there are now four chapters. I’m incapable of writing short fics apparently.


	4. Chapter 4

The flight takes a couple hours, and as far as Scott’s concerned it’s far too long. Twenty four hours has never seemed like such a short space of time, each one of them passing simultaneously in the blink of an eye and an entire age, her pain making time drag, the knowledge of what's coming making it speed up. And Scott wants both to be true. He wants things to go faster so they’ll get to Banner and find this cure, but slower in case they  _ can’t.  _ Because although that’s an unthinkable thought, Scott has to accept that it could be fact. 

Hope enters into some kind of state of shock, turning pale and silent and still, breathing shallow, eyes moving slowly. Scott keeps his arm around her shoulders for the entire flight, rubbing circles on her arm, planting kisses into her hair and telling her it will be ok. He’s pretty sure she doesn’t believe him, hell  _ he  _ doesn’t believe him, but he’s got to try.

The plane splutters to the ground on the highway closest to the research centre Hope had helped Carol to map out the day before (worlds away), and zombies surround the plane as soon as it stills. It’s a clunky old cargo plane, and Scott asks the universe why the hell it couldn’t have been a fighter jet left operational and fuelled up in the hangar on the airbase rather than this, slow and bumpy, leaving Scott unsure that the doors will hold against the onslaught of the undead. 

He’s never hated them more, the rotting, gruesome, groaning undead. They’ve taken everything away from him, and he’s only just beginning to appreciate what that means. That they’re not going to stop. The zombie apocalypse, it turns out, is not linear. It’s not destruction at the beginning, turning to something calmer as time passes, civilisation eventually rebuilding. It’s just this. It’s just pain and loss and fear, day after day, month after month, year after year. 

Scott leaves Hope only to kill the zombies, pushing out of the plane’s roof hatch with Valkyrie and Thor and Gamora, taking the small crowd out with silenced guns and no hesitation, head shots to kill, the undead falling still on the tarmac. 

When Scott climbs back in through the hatch, he finds Cassie beside Hope, holding her hand, silent and steady. His two favourite people. In any other circumstance, he would smile and join them. But this is different. And he doesn’t want Hope to die.  _ God _ , he doesn’t want Hope to die. And he doesn’t want Cassie to have to watch. 

“Which way is it?” Valkyrie asks, looking out of the windows. 

“It’s not far away,” Carol says, frowning at a map. They’re surrounded by fields, the outlines of buildings visible at the edges. 

“Yeah but  _ which direction _ ?” Scott snaps, pulling Cassie and Hope to their feet. 

“Can I see?” MJ approaches, stands next to Carol and runs her finger along the weathered paper. “This the place?”

“Yeah, I just can’t figure out if we’re facing west or east? Give me a second, I’ll work it out,” Carol explains, voice gravelly with tiredness. 

“It’s this way. That building there,” MJ taps the paper. 

“You’re sure?” Carol asks. 

“Yeah. Look,” MJ shuts one eye and points out of the window, finger settling on a building in the distance. 

“Oh. Yeah. Yeah, that’s the one,” Carol nods, confident. 

“Ok, so can we go?” Scott’s more impatient, itching to leave, Hope leaning heavily against his side. On Hope’s other side, Cassie still has hold of her hand. 

“We can go,” Carol confirms, and the group springs into action. 

 

It doesn’t take them long to reach the research centre, an hour at most, after picking through the remains of the highway, killing any zombie in their path without hesitation (they’re beyond that, now), walking across a marshy field and over broken fences. 

The centre is quiet when they approach it, a grey brick building inside green metal fencing, a few slow zombies walking circles on the road outside. 

“I am Groot,” Groot whispers sadly, echoing everyone’s unease at the silence of the base. 

“It’s ok, buddy,” Gamora assures him, ruffling his hair. 

“Are you ok?” Scott, trailing behind with Hope and Cassie, asks Hope, as he has been doing every ten minutes for the duration of the walk. He isn’t sure quite how many hours it's been, since the bite, just that it’s been far too many. Hope’s fever is spiking, every step shaky. And he’s never sat and watched this before, never been a part of someone fading into nothingness. Soul replaced by monster. But it’s terrifying to watch. 

“I’m fine,” Hope growls, but the way she trips on thin air says otherwise. Scott holds her tighter, fingers against her waist. 

“So how do we gain entry?” Thor is asking, squinting at the metal fence as if it might melt under his gaze. 

“Uh, maybe the gate?” Peter suggests, pointing at the tall double gate a little way down the fence. 

“Smartass,” MJ rolls her eyes at him, but the group move down, Valkyrie hesitantly pressing the intercom button. 

“Hello?” She pauses. “Is anyone in there? We’re uh, looking for a Doctor Banner?” There’s no response, just a deafening silence. 

“No. No, try again,” Scott insists, stepping forward, pulling Hope with him. “We didn’t come this far for this. She didn’t get bit for  _ this.” _

“Hello?” Valkyrie tries again. 

“Tell him about me. He knew my father,” Hope suggests, every word a struggle. 

“Ok. We can do that,” Scott says softly, before reaching forward and pressing the intercom button himself. “Doctor Banner. Or- or  _ anyone _ who can hear us. Please let us in. We’re good people, I swear we are, and we need your help. This is Hope Van Dyne,” Scott pulls her gently in front of him, making sure she can be seen by the camera. “She and her father were working on something at another research facility before it got overrun. Hope can help you. But - but only if you can help her first. Hope,” Scott takes a deep breath, wary of mentioning the fact that she’s bitten in case whoever is listening, if there  _ is _ anyone listening, is afraid to let someone in as they’re turning into a zombie. But this isn’t just  _ someone _ . This is Hope. And Scott’s pretty sure she’s going to help to save the world. “Hope’s bit. And she’s extremely important. To me, yes, but to the world too. She’s so smart it’s incredible, Banner. She’s so smart she’s going to fix this whole damned world. So if you can hear us, if by some miracle, or freak accident, or fate or-or whatever you want to call it. If you’re still alive in there, you gotta let us in.”

Scott lets the button go, holds onto Hope with both hands. The group waits. The wind picks up. Groot fidgets. Pegasus eats at the grass around his feet, pushing through the cracked sidewalk. Still, they wait. This is their only chance. The only way out of this. If there’s no answer, Hope’s as good as dead, and so is this world. Scott’s going to stand at these gates until someone answers, until he sees a zombified Banner ambling towards them, until lightning strikes him down. One or the other. He’s not leaving. He’s not giving up. 

There’s a creaking sound coming from behind the gate, and the group all look up in unison, expecting it to be the wind or a zombie or a rat. What they don’t expect is to see the side door of the grey building opening up, and a man with wild hair and an unshaven face to step out, wearing Hawaiian shorts and fur lined boots, holding a gun in each hand and looking completely lost. 

“Is that him? Hope? Is that him?” Scott prompts her, making sure she can see him. Scott’s doubtful, wondering how the hell  _ this  _ man can be one of the world’s most scientifically advanced minds. Wondering how he’s going to trust this guy to save Hope. 

“Definitely him. Definitely,” Hope says, and then she’s stepping forward and throwing up blood all over her shoes. 

 

Things move in a blur after that, and Scott’s not sure he could confidently lay the hour’s events out in chronological order if he were to retell them. There’s shouting, and metal clinking, and Hope stops throwing up but passes out cold instead, Scott scooping her up and carrying her through the gap in the gate held open by crazy-hair. Or rather, Doctor Banner. Hope confirmed it was him, and that’s all Scott needs, as far as he’s concerned. He follows Banner back into the side door, vaguely registering him telling them that under no circumstances should they use the  _ main  _ door, and then they’re walking down trashed hallways, up a flight of stairs, passing a sealed room with a zombie pressing its face against the glass of the window. Scott blocks it all out, puts one foot in front of the other, prays that Hope is still breathing, that Banner can stop this or at least stop her  _ pain.  _

“In here,” Banner kicks open a door, pushing through a stack of empty glass bottles and Doritos packets, into a large lab with the blinds pulled down. There’s just enough light to colour the room grey. “You can put her here. Just...can you just give me a minute. I was  _ not  _ expecting company,” he closes his eyes, rubbing his temples. Scott sets Hope down carefully on a lab table. He worries she looks uncomfortable, pulls a spare jacket from his backpack to put beneath her head. 

“Are you  _ drunk _ ?” May is asking, hands on hips, standing protectively over Hope. 

“I told you I wasn’t expecting company! Like, anytime. Ever again!” Banner defends himself. 

“Can you fix her?” Gamora asks. “Can you save Hope?”

“Can I fix her?” Banner spits. “I...give me a  _ minute. _ ”

They all pause for a second. Hope is far too still underneath Scott’s hands. And she doesn’t deserve this, not a single second of this pain. She’s never been anything but good to him and Cassie, never been anything but helpful to the rest of the group. She was willing to walk damned near halfway across the country on the off chance that there might be a cure, or the possibility of helping to make one. Not for herself, but everyone else. She knew the risks, and though Scott wishes he could take her place, he knows that this is something she was prepared to face. Hope Van Dyne deserves better. She deserves better than to die on a lab table in a trash filled room. She deserves better than a drunk scientist who has clearly been alone for far too long. She deserves better than this whole damned zombie apocalypse. Scott’s going to do everything in his power to help her get it. 

“Peter, MJ, Cassie. Find Mr Banner some coffee,” Scott tells them, voice low, verging on threatening. 

“Where are we supposed to find  _ that _ ?” Peter asks, not noticing MJ’s side eye telling him to be quiet. 

“You’re good at finding things, kid. You’ll find some,” Scott insists, and MJ is pulling the two other teens from the room. 

“Mr Banner,” Scott cracks his knuckles once they’re gone, kicking at the trash on the ground until he finds what he’s looking for. It’s a water bottle, half full. “I’m sure you’re a nice enough guy. But right now, Hope needs you. And she doesn’t have time for you to have  _ a minute _ .” Scott unscrews the bottle as he speaks, striding to Banner in one large step and depositing the contents of the bottle onto his head. 

“ _ Ow _ , what are you  _ doing _ ?” Banner protests, tipping his head forwards to rid his hair of water. Thor is sniggering behind Scott. 

“Help her. Help Hope. I’ll  _ beg  _ if I have to,” he takes Banner’s shoulders, starts to shake them. “I’ll do whatever it takes, man. I’ll  _ waterboard  _ you if I have to. Just help her. God knows she deserves it.” There are tears in Scott’s eyes now. They haven’t come this far for this to be the ending to Hope’s story. 

Scott releases the scientist, searches his bloodshot eyes for a hint of empathy or stroke of genius. 

“Nothing?” Carol steps forward this time, arms folded. “What have you been doing all this time, anyway? Did you just give up?”

“No. I didn’t just  _ give up _ ,” Banner insists, starting to stand up a little straighter. 

“We found this!” Cassie is back in the room, MJ and Peter in tow, carrying a large electric blue can. “I think it’s some kind of energy drink,” she hands it to Scott. It looks like something the college kids Scott would walk past on his way to work used to drink. Not coffee, but good enough, so he hands it off to Banner. 

“Thank you,” Banner opens the Can with a pop and drinks the whole can down in a collection of long gulps. Scott’s half impressed, half disgusted. 

“You were saying?” Valkyrie prompts, once he’s done drinking. 

“I was saying,” Banner pauses, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “That I needed a minute.” He scrunches up the can in one hand. 

“You’ve had more than a minute,” Thor points out. 

“Oh, I know. I know,” Banner’s half laughing. “But I can’t cure her. I don’t have a cure to the virus. Yet. Quite.”

Scott’s heart sinks, shatters, implodes. 

“What does that mean?” Carol picks up on the words Banner uses. 

“I have something. I can’t cure her but,” he pauses, turning and walking to an icebox in the corner of the room. “I can slow the spread of the virus. I can buy her some time, probably.”

“Probably?” Scott questions. There’s a glimmer of hope. He doesn’t want it to be for nothing. Can’t stand it being taken away again. 

“I’ve tried it on three rats. And a raccoon. The maximum survival rate was one week.”

“ _ One week _ ?” Scott splutters. It sounds like nothing. He’d fooled himself into thinking Banner would have a forever cure. 

“It’s a hell of a lot better than twenty-four hours,” Banner points out, extracting a syringe from the ice box, half filled with a thick red liquid. 

“Why does it look like blood?” Is Scott’s instinctual first question as Banner shakes the vial a little. 

“Because most of it is,” he answers, matter-of-fact. 

“What?” Scott recoils. “And you claim  _ this  _ can delay the zombie virus?”

“Do you want to let me try or not?” And Scott wants to say no, wants to take Hope out of this place and get her back to the airbase, pray that by some kind of miracle she’s the first human to ever be immune to the virus. 

But the evidence is clear. There’s the blood on her shoes and lips, the paleness of her skin, the heat of her forehead under the back of Scott’s hand. Hope’s going to die. There’s no getting around that. Everyone is watching him, waiting for his say so, Banner poised with the injection. Scott knows he doesn’t have a choice in this. He has to do what’s right for her. He nods once, holds his breath as Banner pushes the glinting silver point into Hope’s arm. 

  
  


Hope wakes up slowly, light filtering in through her eyelashes and making her head spike with pain. She feels a little like she’s been hit with a freight train, body aching, veins themselves feeling heavy and poisonous. At first, she’s blissfully oblivious, taking the time to catalogue her symptoms and make sure all of her limbs are intact, wiggling her toes and feeling something soft against her fingertips. For a few minutes, she’s nobody and nothing, existing in a bubble away from her past. 

Then, slowly, the memories come back to her. The apocalypse, her parents, Scott and Cassie, the airbase, the journey to find Banner, the plane, the zombies, the...the bite. With an agonising sinking feeling, Hope remembers the bite. She remembers throwing up blood all over her shoes. She remembers the white hot pain. 

Panic takes over her as she wonders how long it’s been, how many seconds are left to tick away. If her life was an hourglass, how much sand is left to filter through to the bottom?

The panic increases as she realises it feels like it’s been a very, very long time, her gut telling her more time has passed than she would like. She wonders, fleetingly, whether she’s one of  _ them  _ now. Whether she’s a snarling, rotting monster. Whether inside the horrifying shells, the human being still inhabits them. Becomes the back seat driver in a very real kind of hell. 

Hope wrenches her eyes open, blinking against the faint artificial light, checking her hands and arms. She can still move them at will, still has dominion over her own body. They don’t look like they’re rotting away. When she coughs, she still sounds like herself. Sure, it makes her chest feel like fire, but she’s pretty sure she’s still whole and definitive and  _ human _ . Hope breathes a scratchy sigh of relief.

Next, to figure out where she is. Hope has some fuzzy memory of seeing Doctor Banner at the research centre, guesses they’re inside a room in the lab. It’s small, with off white walls, a closed blue door, a window to the left, curtains pulled closed across it. Hope’s in a hospital-type bed, scratchy blue blanket pulled up to her shoulders. There’s an IV of clear fluid snaking into her arm. And, much to her surprise, Scott, sound asleep, a mess of limbs on an uncomfortable looking green chair to her left. His hair is a mess and there’s dirt on his face, and he looks worried, even in sleep. Hope wants to wake him up and tell him it’s all ok, despite the fact that that isn’t actually the case. Anything to make him smile. This brave, kind-hearted man who has waited for her. Who has brought her into his family until she slotted into it like a puzzle piece. Until it became  _ hers _ , something clicking into place in her soul. 

Hope doesn’t mean to wake him, but there’s a surge of pain in her veins, something she’s never felt before the bite, like someone is replacing her blood with gasoline, sending it up with a match. She winces, a whimper of pain escaping her lips before she can stop it. 

“Hope?” Scott’s scrambling out of the chair in an instant, almost falling onto the ground, catching his footing at the last second. 

“I’m ok. I’m ok,” her words are hissed through gritted teeth. She doubts they sound very believable, but the pain is ebbing away as quickly as it came on. 

“Hope.” It’s not a question this time, her name holding more weight, uttered like a promise or a prayer. “You’re...you’re still…”

“Still me,” Hope finishes his sentence, her throat scratchy and raw like she’s been screaming for hours. “How… how long has it been?” She's terrified to ask. Terrified to know the truth. Either she’s within the twenty-four hours and still going to turn, or Banner, by some ridiculous miracle, has found a cure. Either the world’s going to change or it isn’t. 

Scott senses this, cups her hand tightly between both of his own. “Not quite twenty-four.”

“Oh.” Hope’s heart sinks. She had been so hopeful. She feels better now than she did early. How is  _ that  _ possible?

“But,” Scott kisses her hand. “Banner came through for us. Kind of. It looks like.”

“What? What does that mean?” Hope pauses, squeezing Scott’s hand. 

“He didn’t have a  _ cure  _ as such, but he’s been working on this, this serum. It pauses the virus. You’re the first human trial, so, uh, I guess I should be congratulating you,” Scott tells her, studying her face intently like he’s expecting something. A reaction or a transformation. All Hope feels is lost. 

“I...What?”

“He has this serum. It’s made mostly of blood actually, it’s pretty gross, but he’s tried it on rats and a raccoon, and it...it’s kind of effective at delaying the transformation.”

“Kind of effective?”

“Its had, um...mixed results,” Scott gulps. “But look, honey, he’s working on other options. There are other ways to stop this,” Scott drops one of his hands from hers, runs it through his hair. 

“So...so what does this mean? That I might turn at any second?”

“Not- it doesn’t work like that. But you might...you might just keep getting sicker. Just more slowly. But you’ll still...Banner thinks you’ll still turn.”

Hope blinks the remnants of sleep from her eyes, takes a deep breath, processes it all. She isn’t sure whether to be happy or sad, whether to let go and allow tears to spill from her eyes or laughter to bubble from her throat. Because she’s still here. She’s still alive, and conscious, bearing the twenty-four hour mark. And that’s what the zombie apocalypse is about, how you find a reason to keep going on. You live for the now. This very instant. 

But on the other hand, this is just prolonging the inevitable. The agonising death that’s been waiting for her all these years. The all consuming terror and loneliness she feels when she thinks of slipping into the blackness. Of leaving them all behind. 

But time is time, no matter how you colour it. It’ll pass at the same rate. Some people can do more in twenty four hours than others can do in a month. All is not lost. 

“I need to speak to Banner,” Hope declares. 

“Hope, that’s not...he’s not going to be able to speak to you right now,” Scott says, anger bubbling to the peaks of his words. 

“What? Why the hell not?”

“Let’s just say he’s not in a fit state for company,” Scott rubs his forehead with his free hand. “I gave him two hours to sort himself out. That was an hour ago. Man’s got work to do.”

Hope’s nervous. An hour feels too long, too risky. She wonders if she’ll know when she’s about to turn or whether it’s just going to happen. Will it feel like fading away, or will it be a sudden snap? Will she have a chance to end things herself? Will the people around her even be  _ safe _ ?

“Scott,” she trains her eyes on him. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“What? Why would I be anywhere else?”

“I could turn. I could- it could happen suddenly. I could hurt you, Scott, I could kill you.” And that’s far worse than death itself. The knowledge that she could hurt any one of them. 

He watches her for a beat. “Nah. You won’t do that. You’re ok. You’re ok, Hope.”

“You can’t say that, you can’t know that! You can’t-”

“I can’t leave you.” Scott’s definitive. Absolute. “I can’t. Can’t do that. Hope, I’ve seen some terrifying shit during this apocalypse but this past day...seeing you like that...I can’t. I can’t leave you. This is where I need to be.” Scott pulls his hand from hers, cups her face with both of his. “I love you, Hope. You’re stuck with me now.”

And against all odds, logic, science and reason, Hope’s stomach does backflips like she’s fifteen years old and the cute boy in her class is kissing her underneath the bleachers. Her body is still human enough to feel this. Despite the fact that it is withering and dying, her life coming to a close, it is still capable of love. 

“Oh.” There are tears in her eyes now, for more reasons than she cares to sift through. There’s only one that’s important, right now. “I love you too.”

Scott smiles a half smile, his eyes lost in hers, and their lips crash together, hers poison, his laced with salt water. They are lost in each other for a minute, and then Scott crawls into the thin bed next to her, holds her against his body, counts her breaths. And just for a while, in the liminal space between sleep and wake, they are elsewhere. They could be back in the tiny bedroom on the airbase. They could be in a truck on their journey cross country. They could be in a bed in a world with no zombies, waking up on a sleepy Sunday to make pancakes. 

  
  


When they wake up, a couple hours later, tangled together, Hope asks Scott if he can get Banner again. This time, he obliges, finding the scientist in the lab with Valkyrie and Carol. 

“Scott,” Carol pushes her chair away as soon as she sees him, getting to her feet like she’s been kicked. “Is she… is she alright?” Scott knows what she’s asking. She wants to know if Hope is a rabid monster, a demon possessed shell. Or if there’s still some kind of chance. 

“She’s hanging in there,” Scott confirms. Valkyrie and Carol visibly relax a little, shoulders slackening, looks of relief on their faces. “She wants to see you,” he points at Banner. 

Banner nods, getting to his feet. “Ok. I can do that. Whatever she needs.” Scott’s a little surprised. This isn’t the same guy who greeted them hours ago. “Look, I’m...i'm sorry. About before. It’s the end of the world,” he shrugs, eyes sad. Scott can’t help but sympathise. 

 

Hope’s sitting up in the bed when they get back to her room, sweat beading on her forehead, skin tinged grey. She’s slightly out of breath too, all signs pointing to her sitting up having been a very difficult task. 

“Hope,” Scott moves to her side in quick strides, checking she’s ok, hands on her face and arms and shoulders, smoothing back her hair. 

“I’m ok, Scott,” Hope tells him, trying to slow her breathing down. “Doctor Banner,” she looks up, looking Banner dead in the eye. “I guess I have you to thank.”

“Don’t thank me yet,” he says sadly. 

“We’ve travelled a really long way to find you.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“So,” Hope shuffles up the bed a little more, grimacing through each movement. “I might not have long left. But you’ve bought me, bought us some time.” She pauses, squeezing her eyes shut for a beat. “I think it’s time we got to work.”

“Hope,  _ no _ ,” Scott protests. He’s certain there’s no way she can work like this. What she needs is rest. Banner, who Scott’s been informed has no less than seven PhDs, can solve this. Scott’s sure he can if he applies himself, stays away from the large glass bottles in the cupboard in his lab. 

“ _ Scott _ ,” Hope looks at him, determination in her gaze. “This is why I’m here. This is why we spent weeks hiking across the country. I know what I’m doing here. And you...you just have to trust me.” Scott has never heard her sound quite so quietly confident, eyes blazing. And he does trust her, more than he trusts just about anyone else, aside from Cassie. He trusts that Hope believes she can do this, believes she’s strong enough to fix this damned broken world. 

It’s not a feeling Scott can explain, but against all logic, he’s letting himself believe that she can too. It’s that gut feeling again, the one that’s saved his life before, the one that’s kept him and Cassie alive, dragged through ditches and beaten down and frayed around the edges, but  _ alive _ . In a world filled with things once deemed impossible, it’s hard to know who to trust,which of the voices inside your own head is telling the truth. So gut instinct, instead of logic, has steered Scott this far. He’s praying it will be right this time too, never needed it so much. 

“You think you can do this?” He checks with Hope one last time. 

“I know I can.”

“You get too tired, you stop, ok? Please, Hope. I can’t… I can’t lose you.” And he knows, looking at her through the weak lamplight, darkness and zombies raging on outside, that she understands. Understands acutely what it means to care so much about someone in a world where almost everyone else you have ever cared about is gone. 

“It’s ok,” she whispers, just for him, smile crinkling the corners of her eyes. “I’ve got this.” She’s sure. She’s sure, so Scott is too. 

 

Scott watches Banner and Hope work in awe, amazed at the connections Hope’s brain makes, the way she can leap from one thing to another, twist the science to a different angle until solutions sit in the light to be tested and pulled apart at the seams. Hope’s got knowledge stored inside her mind from each of the scientists at the research centre she was at before it fell. Theories from her parents and their colleagues, science picked up from the people who sat with her on the floor of her father’s lab where she cut her baby teeth, learned what it meant to be a scientist. She’s got her own theories too, equations blooming in her head to the thump of their boots on the ground in Oregon. 

It takes them two days to talk everything out. Hope does not turn. She insists they stay in her room, door bolted shut, no one but Scott and Banner allowed in. Banner sits beside a loaded gun, bullet with her name on it. She does not hand one to Scott. It’s kinder that way. 

They draw up diagrams on Banner’s whiteboard, spend hours with vials of chemicals. Hypothesise and scrap ideas at the drop of a hat. 

Between it all, Hope sleeps, and drinks the bottles of water Scott brings, forces down just enough food to stay sharp. She refuses strong pain medication, citing the mind numbing brain fog it brings on, takes low doses only, talks through the agony. 

By the end of day two, Hope is getting worse, and quickly. Banner takes notes periodically, jotting down Hope’s symptoms and body temperature in a neat red book. She’s the first human test subject, and they’re going to be using the virus blocker as a basis for an honest to God  _ vaccine.  _ Which, Scott thinks, is definitely one of the things high up on the list of ‘too good to be true.’ A vaccine would finally mean that this nightmare is coming to an end. That humans can claw their way back from the edge, start to rebuild some semblance of society. It feels like asking for too much. Scott just wants some place quiet, a healthy and happy family in the form of Hope and Cassie. A peaceful corner in a ruined world. But one can’t exist without the other. No vaccine without Hope. She donates her mind and her blood for Banner to study. She’s an important puzzle piece in the story of the end of the world. 

No vaccine without Hope, and no Hope without the vaccine. If she doesn’t get it soon, Scott knows she isn’t going to  _ be _ Hope anymore.

 

Scott wakes up on their fourth day after arrival, terrified that it’s  _ the  _ day. The day he loses her. He’s sure there’s no way she can live much longer than the test rats did, no way that the human body has found ways to adapt beyond the laws of nature. Scott’s trying to split his time between Hope and Cassie, checking that Cassie’s ok, safe, that she’s had enough to eat. She’s quiet and scared-looking every time he checks in on her, but she insists she’s ok, that he spend his time with Hope. He’s juggling guilt along with all of the other emotions that come with losing someone at the end of the world, feeling like a terrible father for the millionth time this apocalypse, but Cassie’s started calling the three of them a family, and Scott knows she’s right. And families take care of one another. So, he spends most of his time in Hope’s room. 

He wakes up on the fourth day with her forehead pressed into his shoulder, so warm it feels like it’s burning him, the shaking back more violently than ever. And this, he thinks, has to be close to the end. 

“Hope?” He whispers, shaking her shoulder gently. She stirs with a groan, blinking rapidly over bloodshot eyes. “You ok?” Stupid question, he knows. But he doesn’t know how else to phrase it.

“I don’t know,” is her response, after a pause, and Scott’s even more terrified after that. For the past few days, Hope’s been so sure, so adamant that she was ok, that she’s been fighting this. Hope, Scott thinks, is the strong one. Unshakeable. This is all new.

He’s not even sure what to say back to that. What to do. Should he get Banner? Should he ask her to check off a list of symptoms? No one's told him what to do in this scenario, like most other things in the apocalypse. 

“Is there anything I can do?” Is what he settles for, fights the urge to run for help or try to fix this himself. It’s not something he can fix. He’s helpless, a bystander in this catastrophe. 

“Is it light out?” Hope asks, as Scott finds her hand and tangles their fingers together. 

“It’s getting there.”

“Sunrise?”

“Yeah.”

Hope pauses again, takes a breath. “I want to see it.”

“The sunrise?”

“Yeah. In case...in case it’s my last one.”

And Scott wants to tell her not to be dumb, that of course this won’t be her last sunrise. That she’ll watch them for years to come, thousands upon thousands of mornings of the sun drenching the earth in pink and gold. At five a.m on the hottest day of the year and eight on the darkest, coldest winter morning. A light show, just for her. 

But he doesn’t. He doesn’t tell her anything. They’ve talked for hours, told each other everything they have to say. Scott knows what he means to her, and knows he’s made it clear what Hope means to him. There are no words left, no words Scott knows for this day that he has not already said. 

So instead, he moves Hope’s bed so she can see clearly out of the little window, sits behind her and holds her against his chest, feels the movements in her back with each breath, savours them. The sunshine tinges her orange, warms their faces, promises a new beginning they’re never going to get. She’ll turn soon, he knows. He can’t explain how, but he can feel it, like her soul is losing its battle against evil and fading out of the room. And he can’t stop it, no matter how much he wants to. So he’ll just hold her, here in this moment, help her watch the sunrise over her last day on earth, until she’s gone from him. 

 

Banner interrupts their silence, once the sunrise has become diluted and pale, Scott’s heart stopping between each of Hope’s breaths as he waits for the next. The low creaking of the door makes Scott jump and turn quickly, over a year in the zombie apocalypse has him trained to react to the slightest sound in the distance. But it’s not one of the gruesome monsters he’s watching Hope become, it’s Banner, dishevelled around the edges, a stack of paper in hand. 

“Is she…?” He nods at Hope, and Scott hates how that’s the first thing everyone, including himself, is asking these days. It’s something of a greeting now, two words of an unfinished sentence. 

“She’s alright,” Scott says, half truth. 

“Listen, I’ve found something. I’ve-I think I’ve figured it out.” Just like he doesn’t have to finish the sentence asking about Hope, Banner doesn’t have to explain what it is he’s figured out. It’s the only thing on everyone’s minds. But Scott’s unsure why Banner doesn’t sound happy about it. 

“What? That’s great! Right?” Scott doesn’t let himself celebrate, pushes away the relief trying to ebb into his muscles. Not yet. He can’t face having that taken away from him. 

“There’s something I need to complete the vaccine,” Banner says, walking into the room until he’s standing beside the bed. Hope’s eyes are squeezed shut, and Scott wonders whether she’s awake enough to be listening. 

“Something easy to obtain?” Scott asks hopefully. 

“I mean, it’s in the building,” Banner runs a hand through his messy hair. 

“So? What’s the problem?”

“You remember all those doors with the x’s on ‘em?”

It’s impossible for Scott to forget. He’s pretty sure he’s unlikely to fart any key piece of information as integral to his survival as this. The doors marked with X’s to signify the undead linger behind them. The doors none of them is supposed to go through. That none of them would ever be dumb enough to go through. 

“So what you’re saying is that there’s a vital component of Hope’s cure behind a zombie door,” Scott summarises. 

“I wouldn’t have said it quite like that, but...yeah,” Banner shrugs. “What I need is in a lab off B corridor.”

“B corridor?”

“That’s...pretty much the worst one. It used to be where most of the centre staff were based. So when the virus hits…” Banner shakes his head. Another sentence that doesn’t need finishing. The apocalypse is full of them. 

“Ok. Ok, so we need some kind of strategy. We can use duct tape again, and - oh do you have any helmets? Like a football helmet would be  _ ideal _ but I realise that’s unlikely-”

“Scott.” Banner stops him. “Whoever goes in there…it’s unlikely they’re coming out.”

“All due respect, but we’re pretty seasoned zombie navigators at this point.”

“They’re  _ hungry _ . And there’s basically a whole hoarde of ‘em. In a bunch of the labs along that corridor. They’re not just in one area, they can’t just be dealt with with firepower.”

“Yeah. That’s why I said we need a  _ strategy, _ ” Scott says, trying to pretend his voice isn’t an octave or ten higher than it usually is. 

Banner looks at him for a while, expression unreadable. “I’d go down there myself. But I’m the only one who knows how to make this vaccine. Maybe there’s a way I can, I-”

“No.” Scott stops him. “If you die then the world dies, Bruce. I’ll go. I can do it. It’s not a big deal.”

“It’s very much a big deal. Look, I think we need to talk to the rest of the group about this first. If we just had more  _ time  _ to plan our approach…”

“What are you saying? We don’t have  _ time _ . And if you’re suggesting what you think you are then you can forget about it. We’re doing this. Today.”

“Scott, I’m sorry. I wasn’t...I just…”

“It’s ok,” Scott sighs. “You’re right, we should talk to the others about this. But then I’m going to get whatever it is you need.”

 

They round everyone up from various safe rooms into the lab, Scott finding Cassie at the end of a hallway in a windowsill, flipping through the pages of a book in the early morning light. 

“Peanut,” he greets her, kissing the top of her head. “We’re having a meeting in the lab. C’mon.”

“What’s it about?” Cassie asks, unmoving from her spot. 

“You’ll see.”

“Is it Hope?”

“Yes and no.”

“But she’s still alive?” Cassie finishes her sentences. 

“Yeah. Yeah, she’s still alive.” It goes unsaid that she won’t be for much longer. Not unless they can get what Banner needs. Cassie nods, hops down from the windowsill and follows Scott to the lab. 

 

“What is this about?” Gamora pounces on Scott as soon he walks in, Cassie and Banner trailing behind. “Is H-”

“Hope’s still alive. Let me just get that out of the way now,” Scott tells them all, loud and clear. There’s an audible sigh of relief around the room. 

“So it’s about the cure, then,” Valkyrie guesses, from her spot at the front of the room, on a bench beside Carol, sides pressed together. 

It’s been a few days since they were all together like this, and though there’s a giant hole in the room where Hope should be, Scott realises he’s missed this. He guesses that you don’t spend weeks stuck in an airbase with a group of people at the end of the world without forming some kind of attachment. 

“It’s a preventative, rather than a cure,” Banner points out. Valkyrie rolls her eyes in response. 

“Ok. So it’s about the  _ preventative  _ then?”

“Yes. It is,” Scott says, as Banner fiddles with a computer monitor at the front of the lab. 

“So, what of it?” Thor wants to know. 

“Bruce here, with a lot of help from Hope, has finished the recipe for a cu- sorry,  _ preventative _ ,” Scott tells them, talking fast. Every second that they’re here is a second that Hope could be changing into a monster. 

There’s a brief chorus from the group of  _ what _ and  _ are you serious?  _ And  _ what does this mean _ ? Scott stops them from celebrating with a shake of his head. 

“There's some more ingredients we need to make this work. Now, the good news is that they’re in this very building. The bad news is that they’re behind the doors with the X’s on. Some place called B corridor,” Scott continues. 

“B corridor is a bad, bad place,” Banner supplies. He hits the monitor firmly on it's side and a crackly black and white video feed appears. A couple of mouse clicks later and there’s a split screen image, half of a hallway, half of a lab. Both are swarming with the undead. Scott shudders a little at the thought of being in an enclosed space with that many of the undead. But still. He’s planning on going in there. He’d risk it unarmed. 

“So that’s not looking great,” Carol says what they’re all thinking. “What is it we need from there?”  _ We _ . Like they’re a team, unconditionally and without doubt. This is their problem to solve. Scott smiles around at them all for a second before turning his attention back to Banner, who is drawing things on his whiteboard. The names of chemicals and pictures of the symbols on the bottles. There are two chemicals needed. Without them, Banner is certain there can be no vaccine. With them, there’s a chance. 

“So,” Carol claps her hands together when Banner is done explaining. “Who’s going to go get the chemicals?”

“Well, me, obviously,” Scott says, impatient. 

“Why obviously?” Gamora asks. 

“Hope’s my...she's my...I need to do this, for her.” No word Scott could pick to describe what Hope means to him seems to fit. 

There’s a thumping sound behind them, and Cassie has dropped the hardback book she had been holding on the ground. 

“Peanut?” Scott’s concerned. 

“You can’t go.” Her voice is tiny, like she’s ten years younger and lost. “If you die, there’s no vaccine. And Hope’ll die. And you’ll both be gone.”

“Oh,  _ Cassie _ .” Scott wants to walk over to her and engulf her in a hug, but he’s rooted to the spot. Stuck with indecision. Because Cassie’s right, and going in there may very well mean leaving her all alone. And that’s a thought too terrible to stand. But so, equally, is the idea of losing Hope. 

“Let me help you!” Cassie offers. “I can come. I can do it. I’m fast, I can crawl through the vents. The z’s won’t even know I’m there.”

“No. No way. No way in  _ hell _ ,” Scott tells her, because worse than both of those thoughts is the idea of Cassie being torn apart by zombies. No time for a vaccine for her. Because that’s what will happen to anyone in there who gets caught. They’ll be eaten alive. 

“Dad!”

“No.”

“Your dad’s right,” Peter tells her, reaching to touch her arm. Cassie flinches away, steps backwards and towards the lab door. 

“Cassie! Where are you going?” Scott calls. 

“To the bathroom. I need a second,” she spits back. Scott isn’t sure he believes her. 

“Cassie, just wait a minute-”

“I’ll be quick. I just need to- to be by myself for a second, ok?”

Scott’s torn, wanting her to stay in sight, or to ask someone to go with her, but she’s pausing in the doorway, her eyes earnest, and he knows he has to trust her. “Three minutes. Or I’m coming to find you.” Cassie nods and rounds the corner, out of sight. 

Banner goes back to the monitor, pointing out various features, the number of rooms on each side of the hallway. They argue about who’s going to go into the hallway, Gamora reasoning that it should be her because she owes Hope her life twenty times over and is good with a sword, Carol reasoning that she should do it because of her military experience. Valkyrie and Thor want to go in together as a team. May wants to go because she’s quick on her feet. Peter wants to go because he’s quicker. MJ reasons that she could figure out a way to outsmart the zombies. Scott’s certain his reasoning is the most solid, and that he should be the one to go in. And all the while, Scott is painfully aware that they’re wasting time. That they don’t have the luxury of this debate, of fighting over who gets the rights to die. The vaccine is going to save the world. It’s going to save  _ Hope _ . Scott figures it’s worth his best shot. 

Something changes on the monitors, Scott catching it out of the corner of his eye, the zombies freezing in place where previously they had been lumbering around each other. They stop, like they’re listening, and at the exact second that Scott realises Cassie has been gone longer than the three minutes she was given, the zombies all look up. And his blood runs icy. 

“No. No _ , no, no _ ,” Scott grabs the monitor with both hands, looking closer. It can’t be...she wouldn’t be so  _ stupid _ ...he  _ trusted her to come back.  _

“Scott?” May is concerned. 

But Carol gets in instantly. “I’m going in after her. This is  _ my  _ territory dammit I know what I’m doing,” she gets to her feet as everyone seems to catch on with what’s going on. 

“Oh!” May claps both hands to her mouth. 

“I’m coming with you. She’s my kid. She’s  _ fifteen _ , why did she think this was a good idea?” Scott splutters, approaching the door, but Carol puts a hand on his chest as he nears it. 

“That’s precisely the reason you can’t come, Scott. You’re too close. You’ll make a dumb mistake. Let me go, I’ve got a clear head. I’m Cassie’s best bet at survival. You might get us all killed.”

“Carol,  _ no _ ,” Scott protests, but even as he speaks, he knows she’s right. He wants to run to the vents in corridor B and drag Cassie back here, no matter what’s standing in his way. That isn’t logical thinking. 

“I’ll bring her back. I’ll get her back, I promise you,” Carol tells him, and then she’s pushing him back with her full force until he collides with the lab table behind him, and without a word, stepping from the room.

A second later, and Gamora is pressing a kiss to Groot’s cheek. “I need to go too. I can help.” And she’s gone before anyone can register what she’s saying. 

 

Scott’s numb. He woke up this morning thinking he was going to lose Hope. Banner sparked some kind of belief that she might live with the news of the vaccine, and then Scott more or less accepted his  _ own  _ death as a means of keeping Hope and the rest of the world alive. If he could only have gotten in there, taken the chemicals some place more accessible before being caught by the zombies. It would have worked. He’s sure of it. And now he’s going to lose them both. He’s going to lose Hope and Cassie. The two most important people in his life. And he feels numb. 

The rest of them crowd around the monitor in deathly silence, watching as Carol and Gamora traverse B corridor. And Scott doesn’t  _ want  _ to be watching, but he can’t look away. He’s failed Cassie. He’s failed her by not keeping her safe in this world, his main job as her father. 

So, he watches, standing behind Thor and MJ, staring with unblinking eyes, terrified to watch, terrified to look away. He watches as Gamora and Carol enter the hallway, slashing through the zombies in their path. They work with their backs pressed against the wall, closing each lab door they come to. There’s a close call when a zombie grabs Gamora’s arm at the edge of a supply closet, pulling her closer to it, stalled only by Carol’s silenced gun, pulled from her waistband and pressed against the zombie’s head. There’s no time for recovery, as a fresh wave of them pour out of another open door. 

On the other half of the screen is the lab at the end of the hallway, the one with a giant refrigerator filled with vials of chemicals. It’s still, a small group of zombies moving slowly around the room. Scott’s hoping with everything in him that Cassie stays in the vents, or else turns around and comes back out when she realises just how many zombies are in there, that she doesn’t drop down into one of the nightmare rooms below. He’s pretty sure she’s not going to make an appearance, but then something drops from the ceiling in the lab, and it’s the vent cover, smashing to the ground. There’s no sound from the video feed but Scott guesses it must be pretty loud, alerting all of the zombies in the room and drawing in a couple from outside too. Everyone watching on the monitor freezes, collectively holds their breath, expecting Cassie to fall into the room and become overrun. 

But she surprises them. There’s a tiny movement at the very back of the lab, beside the refrigerator, and Cassie’s shimmying down into the room and dropping gently onto a countertop, checking around her as she gets lower. She dropped the first vent cover to distract them, Scott realises, feeling a rush of pride for her, despite everything.

He watches as she jumps down from the countertop, crouching behind it to avoid being seen, the zombies still puzzled by the vent cover having fallen, and Cassie’s rifling through the storage refrigerator, quickly but quietly leafing through the drawers. 

“That’s one of the chemicals. That drawer there,” Banner taps the second drawer down as Cassie opens it, and they watch as she feels around in the drawer, about to close it before going back for a second look. And she pulls out a handful of vials as Banner nods encouragingly, as if Cassie can see him. 

She continues down the drawers, stuffing the first vials into the pocket of her jacket, closing the zip around them safely, but then Scott’s heart is in his mouth as Cassie pulls one of the drawers open too harshly, sending a vial from it clattering to the ground. The zombies look up from the vent cover, listening, a couple drifting over to the counter Cassie is behind. 

“No, no, no, Cassie. Get up, get  _ up _ ,” Scott growls, but Cassie doesn’t move. She just starts to peel through the drawers faster and faster. And she knows they’re coming towards her, Scott realises. Can probably hear their footsteps and their groaning, but she’s staying here until she finds what she needs. 

The vials are in the bottom drawer, larger than the first ones, and Cassie pinches two of them in her fingers and stuffs them into her pocket, spinning around as zombie feet appear around the edge of the counter. Scott’s seconds from all our sobbing, but Cassie’s standing up, pulling one of Hope’s glinting knives from her waistband, sinking it into the zombie’s skull. It drops, taking the zombie behind it down too, but there’s one coming from the other side of the counter too, more zombies walking as fast as they can over to her, groaning and reaching for her with dead fingers, mouths agape. And Cassie’s stabbing at them, getting a little desperate, scrambling up onto the countertop, reaching for the vent entrance. She’s not going to make it, hands wrapping around her ankles and her knees, leaning in, teeth sharp and yellow and dead, and this is how it’s all going to end, Scott watching his little girl getting murdered on a live feed, he’s paralysed in place, pretty sure his heart has stopped. Unsure if it will ever start again. 

And then...and then the zombies are dropping. And Gamora and Carol aren’t visible on the left hand side of the screen anymore, but they’re bursting their way onto the right hand side. The zombies around Cassie are dealt with quickly, by all three of them, but there are more crowding in, pressing closer. And then the lights die, feed blinking off. 

 

“What happened? Banner,  _ what happened _ ?” Scott demands to know. 

“Did the generator die?” Peter guesses. 

“I- I guess it must have overloaded?” Bruce suggests, both hands knotted in his hair. 

“Can we get it back?” Valkyrie asks, voice panicked. Scott had forgotten that he wasn’t in this alone. Someone Valkyrie loves just as much as Scott loves Hope is in that room. May not make it back. 

“I don’t know. The switch probably needs resetting, it’s outside,” Bruce says. And Scott had thought that watching it all on the monitors was bad, but being blind to it is so, so much worse. 

“Can we get to it?” MJ asks. 

“Yeah. Yeah, it’s in a cupboard near the side door we came in on.”

“Let’s go do that,” MJ suggests, nodding at Peter. 

“We’ll be right back. We’ll fix this,” Peter promises, taking off with MJ, Thor joining them. 

Scott paces. The thought of keeping still now is too much to take. He isn’t sure how he ever did it before. 

“Do you think they’ve made it out?” Valkyrie asks, a little shaky. 

“I don’t know,” Scott snaps. 

They wait in silence. 

A door slams further down the hallway, footsteps coming into earshot. It’s not zombies, the rhythm too steady, but Scott’s sure it’s MJ, Peter, and Thor, having been unable to fix the generator, is about to get annoyed and go out there to fix it himself. But as he turns to the door, it’s not them he finds. 

It’s blonde hair, a little stuck to its owners forehead with sweat. Carol. Valkyrie’s running at her before Scott can really register than she’s there, throwing her arms around her, and Scott thinks the absolute worst until suddenly, Gamora’s in the doorway too, and standing behind her, completely out of breath, a bruise blossoming on her cheekbone already, is Cassie. 

Scott walks to her in two large steps, wraps her in his arms, and breaks down in sobs. In her pocket, the vials jangle together. By some kind of miracle, the universe is on their side today. 

 

**A little over one year later**

 

Rebuilding the world is a full time job, overseen by Cassie Lang’s rag tag sort-of family from an airforce base in Idaho. Cassie kicks off her seventeenth birthday, give or take a day - timekeeping is hard in the apocalypse - by opening the gates to a new group of survivors with her step-mom, welcoming them in and offering them fresh fruit from Carol’s little orchard, plants gathered from orchards and fields and gardens along the way on their trip home from the research centre where they cooked the vaccine. 

It’s been a strange year, Cassie thinks, closing the gates up again. There’s no more zombies out there right now, no need to rush the gate closed. They’re dying off, fewer new ones being born, fewer food sources around. People who have received the vaccine feeling braver and stronger now that they know a bite won’t kill them, reclaiming the country, inch by inch. 

Her dad and Hope are married now, kind of, a strange apocalypse version of marriage, ceremony performed by Thor with daisies laced into his hair. Cassie guesses Hope being hours from death made her want to cling to life all the more, and they got married the day after they all got back to the base. And a week after  _ that  _ they spread out, sending Thor, Carol, Valkyrie, Gamora, her dad and Hope out with vials of the vaccine, an anxious few months as they came and went on messy schedules. 

But things are more settled now, the word being spread far and wide about the vaccine, people travelling from all over the country to get a dose of it. Bruce lives with them now, has taken over a back room in the base to synthesise as much vaccine as they need, his equipment brought back cross country on the back of Pegasus. 

Cassie isn’t stupid. She knows that the world will never go back to the way it did, that three years ago the life she lives now would still have terrified most of the people in the world, living their lives on a tight schedule and counting down the minutes to the weekend. But now, in this time, she thinks she’s got a pretty sweet set up. 

“Hey. How many was that?” Her dad asks her, approaching from the side of the base where he’d been fixing their new water system. There’s a large scale sprinkler system in operation all across the base land now, crops growing taller by the day. 

“Nine in that group,” Hope says. Cassie’s dad steps in between them, one arm around each of their shoulders as Hope presses a kiss to his cheek. 

“Nine fewer zombie fodder,” Scott comments, and Cassie kicks at him. “Hey! Peanut! You’re not helping your case. You know you’re still grounded from that stunt you pulled at the research centre.”

“Oh you mean saving the world?” Cassie raises her eyebrows. “I guess that means I won’t be able to go to the movies with my friends,” she shrugs, and her dad pokes her in the side. 

“I think it was  _ me  _ who saved the world actually,” Hope chips in, raising her eyebrows right back. Scott and Cassie are forced to agree. “Hey, Cassie?” Hope leans around Scott to see her, a minute later. “Happy birthday.”

“Happy birthday, Peanut,” Scott adds, and the little family still by the door to the main building, Cassie moving to wrap an arm around both of them, resting her chin on Hope’s shoulder. The sun’s out, warming up their hair, bringing the petals out in the sunflowers lining the pathway. 

And none of them know what tomorrow’s going to bring, but they’re pretty sure it won’t be worse than where they’ve been. And even if it is, they can face it together. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So we have finally reached the end!! Thank you so so much to everyone who joined in this weird little journey with me. I’m honestly overwhelmed at the response this fic has received!
> 
> I’m very much open to writing more in this universe, for any of the characters in the fic, so please leave a comment or hmu on twitter or tumblr if there’s anything you would like to see ✌🏼

**Author's Note:**

> Please come make my week and yell about these two with me!! I’m on tumblr @jakelovesamy and Twitter @bugsquads


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